The best AI note taker for Microsoft Teams in 2026

The short answer

Pick Noter AI if Teams is your work calendar and the iPhone is your main device. Its bot joins the call from the cloud, so nothing has to be installed or running on a laptop, and you can be on the meeting from whichever device you like.

The rest have a case depending on what you are optimising for.

• Fireflies if the notes have to land somewhere else by themselves: Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce.
• Fathom if you want to spend nothing. Its free plan is the most generous here, but it handles online calls only and has no Android app.
• Otter if your Teams calls are mostly in English and you like reading the transcript while the meeting is still running.
• Granola if policy or personal preference says no extra participant in the call. It captures Teams audio from the desktop app instead, which means you have to be at the computer.
• Notta if you want a bilingual transcript side by side. tl;dv if your Teams calls are sales calls and you want analytics on top of the words.

What Teams gives you on its own, and where it stops

Teams transcribes meetings without any third-party app. Two things have to be true first. The organisation's admin has to enable transcription in the meeting policy, and it has to be started from inside the meeting by someone with permission, usually the organiser. If you are the person who joined a call somebody else set up, that is often not you.

When it does run, the transcript stays inside Teams, in the organiser's Microsoft 365 storage. That is fine when the organiser is you and you work in Teams all day. It is less useful when you wanted the text on your phone on the way home, or when the organiser was a client.

The AI part is a separate purchase. Teams' AI meeting notes, the feature Microsoft calls intelligent recap, need a Teams Premium or Microsoft 365 Copilot licence on top of the normal plan, roughly $10 and $30 per user per month at list price. For a team of ten that is $1,200 to $3,600 a year before anyone has read a summary.

Third-party note takers get around all of this by joining as a guest participant. That has one condition of its own: lobby settings can hold the bot until someone admits it, and some organisations block guest joins entirely. So check the lobby setting before an external call, and tell attendees a note taker is present.

• Built-in transcription. No extra cost, admin-gated, started inside the meeting, stored in the organiser's Microsoft 365.
• Teams Premium or Copilot. Adds the AI recap, roughly $10 or $30 per user per month on top of what you already pay.
• A third-party app. Joins as a guest, works on whatever Teams plan you have now, and puts the transcript and summary on your phone.

All 7 apps compared

Everything below is judged on Teams specifically, not on the product in general.

#1 Noter AI on Teams

Noter AI is the app this site is about, so read this section knowing that. The reason it tops an iPhone-first Teams list is the split between where the bot runs and where you are.

The bot joins the Teams meeting from the cloud. Your laptop can be shut, asleep, or a locked-down company machine where you cannot install anything. You can take the call from the Teams app on your phone, from a meeting room screen, or skip the call entirely and read it later. Nothing records locally, so nothing is lost when a battery dies or a laptop reboots for updates.

Two ways to start it from the iPhone. Paste the Teams link out of the invite or the meeting chat, or connect Outlook or Google Calendar once and tap the meeting in the list when it comes up. The exact taps are written out in how to take notes in Microsoft Teams, step by step, so they are not repeated here.

What comes back, usually about two minutes of processing per hour of audio: a full transcript with speaker labels and timestamps, where tapping any line plays that moment back, an executive summary, a longer analysis, and action items with the name of whoever picked each one up. AI Chat answers questions across one note or across many at once, which is how you find the decision from three sprint reviews ago. Export as PDF, Word or plain text.

Transcription covers 60+ languages and runs on Soniox's speech model. Automatic language identification is on for every recording and the language is tagged word by word, so a Teams call where two people switch between Arabic and English mid-sentence comes back as one transcript instead of two broken ones. There is nothing to choose before the call starts.

The same app records a room. When half your week is Teams calls and the other half is people around a table, one tap starts a recording, or a Control Center widget, or Siri. It keeps running in the background and there is no participant for anyone to ask about. The Android app records the room in the same way.

Price is $9.99 a month or $69.99 a year, flat. No per-seat charge, no cap on AI summaries, 4.8 stars on the App Store.

• No web app and no desktop app. Everything happens on the phone or the iPad. To read a transcript on a big screen you export it.
• No CRM integrations. Nothing pushes into HubSpot or Salesforce automatically. You export or copy.
• The bot is visible in the participant list. Everyone on the Teams call sees it join. That is the honest trade for not needing an admin to enable anything, and it is the right answer for consent, but it is not invisible.
• No permanent free tier. You get about five minutes of audio to test before paying.
• Finished notes translate into exactly 18 languages. A Swedish Teams call can come back summarised in English or German. An English call cannot come back summarised in Swedish.

#2 Fireflies

Fireflies is the one to beat when the transcript is not the end of the job. Its bot joins Teams the same way, and roughly 50 integrations move the output somewhere else: Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Salesforce. For a sales or support team inside a Teams company, that plumbing is often worth more than any difference in transcript quality.

Language coverage is strong, 100+ with automatic detection, so a multilingual Teams call is handled without anyone setting anything first. The mobile apps on iOS and Android record in-person meetings too, which puts it ahead of the desktop-only tools further down this page.

Cost is where a small team feels it. Pricing is per seat, in the $10 to $19 per seat per month range depending on tier, and AI summaries are rationed by monthly credits on the lower plans. Six people on Teams means six seats and six sets of credits. Side-by-side detail is on the Fireflies alternative page.

#3 to #6: Otter, Fathom, Notta and tl;dv

Otter.ai (#3) puts OtterPilot in the Teams call and produces the best live English transcript in this group. If you like watching the words appear while someone is still talking, nothing here beats it. The catch is language: six of them, English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified, with no automatic detection and no translated summaries. For a US or UK company that is irrelevant. For one with offices in Warsaw and Riyadh it falls over on the first mixed-language call. See the Otter.ai alternative comparison.

Fathom (#4) has the most generous free plan in the category and its bot joins Teams without fuss. It covers 38 languages. The reason it sits at #4 on an iPhone-first list is what it cannot do: it is desktop only, it cannot record a room, it cannot import an audio file you already have, and there is no Android app, only an iOS waitlist. When every meeting you care about is a Teams call taken at a laptop and budget is the constraint, start with Fathom. See the Fathom alternative page.

Notta (#5) covers 58 transcription languages and translates into 42, and its side-by-side bilingual transcript is genuinely useful when half a Teams call is in one language and half in another. Two things to know before committing. You pick the language before recording, since there is no automatic detection, which is awkward on a call that switches. And on non-Enterprise plans Notta trains on your content, which is a conversation with your security team rather than a detail. Free sessions stop at 3 minutes. Check the current list for whether your language is covered. See the Notta alternative page.

tl;dv (#6) is built for sales calls. Its bot joins Teams, it claims 30+ languages, and the analytics layered on the transcript are the actual reason people buy it. If your Teams meetings are mostly customer calls, look at it properly. If your phone is your main device, look elsewhere: the iOS app sits around 2 stars and the Android app is a capture-first Lite build. The free plan gives you 10 AI summaries for the lifetime of the account, not per month. See the tl;dv alternative page.

Granola, if you want no bot in the call

Some organisations will not let an unknown guest into a Teams meeting, and some people simply do not want an extra line in the participant list. Granola answers that by working differently from everything above: no bot at all. It captures the audio your computer is already playing plus your microphone, straight from the Teams desktop app on Mac or Windows, so the meeting looks completely ordinary to everyone else on it.

Its note-taking model is also its own. You type rough notes during the call and the AI expands and organises them afterwards, rather than writing a summary from scratch. The output reads like your notes on a good day.

The limitation is the one that matters for this page. Bot-free capture only works where the system audio is, and that is the computer. The phone apps record the room, so a Teams call cannot be captured from a phone. Granola claims 30+ languages and prices per user on the Business plan. The wider trade-off is covered in meeting transcription without a bot and in the Granola alternative comparison.

Getting the bot into a Teams meeting without drama

A bot that never gets admitted produces no notes, and it tends to fail in the first thirty seconds of the one call you cared about. Five habits prevent nearly all of it.

1. 1Check the lobby setting before an external call. In the meeting options, people from outside your organisation can be set to wait in the lobby, and a guest bot lands in there with them. If you organised the meeting you can change it. If you did not, plan for step 5.
2. 2Tell attendees. One sentence at the start does it: "I have a note taker on this call so I can stay in the conversation, say the word if you would rather I turned it off." People object to being surprised, rarely to notes.
3. 3Rename the bot if the tool allows it. "Sarah's Notetaker" in the Teams participant list reads very differently from a product name nobody in the room recognises.
4. 4Test on an internal call first. Start a two-minute Teams meeting with a colleague and send the bot in. That tells you whether your tenant allows guest joins at all, which is not something you want to find out during a client call.
5. 5If the bot is stuck in the lobby, ask the organiser or anyone with permission to admit it, the same as any other waiting guest. If it gets rejected every time, guest joins are probably blocked by policy across the organisation, which is not a fault in the app. Record the room from your phone instead, or capture from the desktop with something like Granola.

Bottom line

For a company on Microsoft Teams, the built-in transcript costs nothing but sits behind an admin policy and lands in the organiser's storage, and the AI summary on top is a $10 or $30 per user per month licence. That gap is the whole reason this category exists.

At a Mac or PC all day and a guest bot is a problem? Granola. Notes that have to arrive in Salesforce without you? Fireflies. Budget of zero, and you never need to record a room? Fathom.

If you carry an iPhone and your week is a mix of Teams calls and people in a room, Noter AI covers both with nothing running on a laptop, at $9.99 a month and no per-seat fee.

Install Noter AI on the App Store and test it on five minutes of your own audio before you decide anything. The Android app, Noter AI on Google Play, records the room.