AI meeting assistants record, transcribe, and summarize your calls so you can pay attention instead of typing. The leading options — Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Microsoft Copilot, and Krisp — all do the basics, but they differ in how they join meetings, how accurately they transcribe, and how well they turn an hour of talking into something actionable.
How they capture meetings
The biggest practical difference is the capture method. Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai send a meeting bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams from your calendar, records, and transcribes in real time. Microsoft Copilot works natively inside Teams, using its captions and recordings with no separate bot. Krisp records locally on your own machine, so there is no visible attendee in the call — handy when a bot would feel intrusive. If your organisation lives in Microsoft 365, Copilot is the path of least resistance; if you span many platforms, Otter or Fireflies are more flexible.
Transcription accuracy
Accuracy is where these tools earn their keep, and it depends as much on your audio as on the model. Krisp’s noise-cancellation heritage gives it an edge on messy audio, and Otter is a long-standing leader in live transcription with speaker labelling. Copilot is reliable within Teams’ controlled environment. Fireflies is competitive and supports many languages. Across all of them, performance drops with strong accents, heavy crosstalk, and poor microphones, so the only honest benchmark is your own recurring meetings.
Summaries and action items
Transcripts are long; summaries are what people actually read. All four generate recaps, but the structured-output quality differs. Fireflies and Copilot are strong at extracting action items, decisions, and questions, and Copilot can answer follow-up queries about a meeting after the fact. Otter produces clean summaries with a chat-style Q&A over the transcript. Krisp focuses on a tidy notes-and-actions output tied to its local recording. Whichever you choose, review the extracted action items — AI still misattributes owners and invents the occasional task.
Integrations and workflow
A meeting tool is only useful if its output lands where work happens. Fireflies stands out for pushing notes and tasks into CRMs (Salesforce, HubSpot) and task managers. Copilot is deeply wired into Outlook, Teams, and the wider Microsoft 365 graph. Otter integrates with calendars and common collaboration apps and offers shareable transcripts. Krisp is lighter on integrations but pairs well with its own noise-cancellation layer that improves audio for everyone on the call.
Privacy and the verdict
Because these tools record conversations, treat privacy as a first-class concern: tell participants they are being recorded, check whether transcripts are used to train models, and review data retention. For Microsoft-centric teams, Copilot is the natural pick. For cross-platform recording with strong CRM push, choose Fireflies. For best-in-class live transcription and shareable notes, Otter.ai. For discreet, on-device capture with superb audio cleanup, Krisp. Test your top one or two on real meetings for a week — accuracy on your audio is the only comparison that matters.