AI Note Taker for Microsoft Teams (2026): The Best Options

An AI note taker for Microsoft Teams captures your meeting audio and turns it into a transcript, a structured summary, and a list of decisions and action items. If you want the short version of which one to use: for most Teams users, the best free option is Fathom (free-forever, unlimited recordings) or Otter (300 free minutes a month and a polished Teams app). If your meetings run in more than one language — or you care about a clean Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean transcript out of Teams — Subanana is the one built for that. And if a bot joining the call is a dealbreaker, Krisp and tl;dv both capture Teams meetings without one.

That's the answer. The rest of this post is how I got there.

I run Subanana, an AI transcription tool that has a Microsoft Teams meeting bot of its own, so I'm one of the options below — I'll point out exactly where the others beat us. Everything here is sourced from each tool's own live documentation as of June 2026; this is a documentation-based comparison, not a lab benchmark. Pricing and free-tier limits change often, so treat the numbers as a starting point and check the vendor's page before you commit.

What is an AI note taker for Microsoft Teams?

It's a tool that listens to your Teams meeting and produces three things: a full transcript, a structured summary, and a list of action items and decisions. Some also pull out questions, follow-ups, and analytics like talk-time.

Microsoft Teams has a built-in transcript, and Copilot can summarise meetings if your organisation pays for it. So why add a third-party note taker? Two reasons keep coming up. First, the built-in transcript is thin on languages and structure — there's no real summary template, no model choice, and multilingual handling is limited. Second, Copilot is a per-seat add-on that many admins haven't licensed, and even where it exists, it's one model's output with no way to swap it. If you want a richer summary, broader language support, or a transcript you actually own and can export, a dedicated note taker fills the gap. (If you want to get the most out of the native transcript first, I wrote a separate Microsoft Teams transcription walkthrough for that.)

How do AI note takers capture a Teams meeting?

This is the first thing to decide, because it changes who sees the tool in your call. There are two approaches.

Bot-in-the-call. The tool sends a participant — a "notetaker bot" — into the Teams meeting. It joins like a guest, records the mixed audio, and leaves. This is how Otter, Fireflies, and Subanana work (Fathom and tl;dv can do this too). The upside: it captures everyone cleanly, including remote attendees, and it works without each person installing anything. The downside: other attendees see the bot join, which some people find intrusive, and some organisations block external bots by policy.

Bot-free, device-level. The tool sits on your machine between your microphone and Teams, capturing your system audio locally. Nobody else sees a bot. Krisp pioneered this; tl;dv and Fathom now offer bot-free desktop capture as well. The upside: invisible, no awkward "who invited this bot?" moment, and it sidesteps admin bot-blocking. The downside: it relies on one person running the capture, and it leans on that person's audio setup.

Neither is strictly better. If you run a lot of external client calls and don't want a visible bot, go bot-free. If you want hands-off capture of internal meetings — including hybrid rooms where some people are remote — a bot that auto-joins from your calendar is less work. I'll flag each tool's approach below.

The best AI note takers for Microsoft Teams in 2026

Otter.ai — the polished all-rounder with a generous free tier

Otter is the name most people reach for, and the Teams integration is mature: you get "real-time transcriptions, key takeaways, and action items from every Teams meeting." It offers both a notetaker bot that auto-joins and a bot-free desktop recorder for Mac and Windows, so you can pick per meeting.

The free Basic plan is genuinely useful — 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation. Paid plans are Pro at $8.33 per user/month and Business at $19.99 per user/month, both billed annually.

Where Otter wins: brand maturity, a polished Teams app, and the deepest bench of US-workplace integrations — Slack, Salesforce, Google Drive, and more — plus the Otter Chat assistant for asking questions across your meetings. If your stack is US-SaaS-heavy, Otter slots in with the least friction.

Where it falls short: Otter is English-first, its AI summary runs on a single model you can't change, and its depth in Asian languages is limited. If your meetings are bilingual or run in Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean, that's a real constraint.

Fireflies.ai — posts notes straight into your Teams channel

Fireflies sends a notetaker bot — "Fireflies.ai joins your Microsoft Teams meetings as a participant, recording and transcribing discussions in real time." You connect your calendar and it auto-joins, or you invite fred@fireflies.ai to a specific call. The standout: after the meeting, it can post the notes — transcript link, recording, and a brief — straight back into a Teams channel of your choice, so the whole team sees the recap without leaving Teams.

The free-forever plan includes unlimited transcription (with limited AI summaries) and 800 minutes of storage per seat. Pro is $10 per seat/month billed annually, with transcription in 100+ languages across plans.

Where Fireflies wins: the Teams-channel post-back is the slickest in this group for keeping a team in the loop, and Fireflies has the strongest CRM story — Salesforce and HubSpot syncs — plus conversation-intelligence dashboards for sales teams.

Where it falls short: it's English-strong rather than multilingual-deep in practice, and summaries are single-model. The bot is visible in the call, which the bot-free tools avoid.

tl;dv — the most generous free tier, with bot-free capture

tl;dv leads on free. Its desktop app records "any Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams meeting in one click — no bot joins the call," capturing "directly from your system audio." It also offers a bot if you'd rather. Transcripts can be translated into 30+ languages.

The plan is "free forever," and it's one of the most generous starting points for individuals. Note that the free AI-notes allowance is capped — a common limit reported is full AI notes for your first handful of meetings, then a partial summary after — so check the current cap if you meet daily.

Where tl;dv wins: the free-forever tier plus a true bot-free desktop option is hard to beat for solo users and small teams, and it has solid sales-coaching features.

Where it falls short: the free AI-notes cap bites if you're in back-to-back meetings, it's English-focused, and 30+ languages is narrower than the broadest tools here.

Read.ai — the tightest native Teams experience

Read.ai is the one that feels most inside Teams. There's a genuine native Teams app you open during the call: "Open the app during your Teams meeting to get insights on engagement, sentiment, talking speed, filler words, and participant talk time," alongside real-time meeting notes. The Read Assistant auto-joins to generate notes, a summary, transcription, and action items, and it works across "Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and in-person meetings."

The free plan covers 5 meetings a month with summaries, transcription, and search, and the Teams app is available to users with a work or school Microsoft account.

Where Read.ai wins: nobody else gives you live, in-meeting engagement metrics natively inside Teams. If you run training, sales, or facilitation and want real-time signals on how a call is landing, Read.ai is unique here.

Where it falls short: the analytics focus means the note-taking, while good, is single-model, and multilingual depth isn't its priority. Five free meetings a month is tighter than Fathom's or Otter's free tiers.

Fathom — free-forever, unlimited, now bot-free

Fathom records "Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams" and is "now available bot-free" via a new desktop app. Its reputation is built on a genuinely generous free plan — free-forever, with a focus on unlimited recordings and summaries for individuals. The Team plan starts at $15 per month for shared features.

Where Fathom wins: for an individual who just wants clean, fast summaries at zero cost without a meeting cap, Fathom's free-forever plan is the most generous in this roundup, and the move to bot-free capture removes the last friction point.

Where it falls short: it's English-first, summaries run on a single model, and multilingual handling is lighter than the tools built for it. Team-wide features sit behind the paid plan.

Krisp — bot-free capture with industry-leading noise cancellation

Krisp is the odd one out, in a good way. It's built on noise cancellation, and the note taker is layered on top. It captures Teams meetings "without a bot joining your call" by sitting between your microphone and Teams at the device level — which is also why it can run two-sided noise cancellation, cleaning up both your mic and the incoming audio. Its Teams AI note taker "supports 17 languages."

Where Krisp wins: it's the only tool here that pairs note-taking with industry-leading AI noise cancellation and real-time accent conversion. If your team takes calls from noisy environments — cafés, open offices, home setups with traffic outside — Krisp produces a cleaner transcript because it's cleaning the audio before transcribing it. Nobody else does this combination.

Where it falls short: 17 languages is narrower than the most multilingual options, the note-taking is single-model, and because capture is device-level it depends on the person running it.

Subanana — built for multilingual Teams meetings and model-flexible summaries

This is mine, so here's the honest scope. Subanana runs a Microsoft Teams meeting bot that auto-joins from your calendar, records the meeting, and then creates a project you can transcribe, summarise, and export. It also has a Google Meet bot. It does not have a Zoom bot — if your meetings live on Zoom, one of the tools above will serve you better there. And the bot is post-production: it captures the meeting and builds the record afterward, rather than showing live captions during the call.

Two things make Subanana different. First, language. Subanana supports 80+ languages and continuously benchmarks speech-to-text models, routing each meeting to the best performer for its language rather than locking to one engine. It's the only tool in this roundup built Cantonese-first, and it handles mixed Cantonese-English, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean meetings — the bilingual and Asian-language case the US-first tools treat as an afterthought. Because the Teams bot receives the platform's mixed audio, hybrid meetings (some people in a room, some remote) are captured cleanly without you wiring up a virtual audio cable.

Second, the summary model. In most tools you get one AI model's summary, take it or leave it. In Subanana you pick the model for the meeting summary from a tiered menu, so you can match the model to the meeting — a fast model for a quick standup, a top-tier one for a dense strategy call. On top of that, every transcript runs through a quality stack: hallucination detection with automatic model substitution, an LLM proofreading pass that flags likely misheard words for you to confirm, and a readability check on the captions. And it's one workspace for transcripts, summaries, subtitles, and live-event captioning, rather than a separate tool per job.

Where Subanana wins: multilingual and Asian-language meetings, model-flexible summaries, and breadth of use cases in one place.

Where it falls short: no Zoom bot; the bot is post-production, not live; it doesn't push summaries into Slack, Notion, or a CRM the way Fireflies does; and the free tier is a preview tier — you can see the result but can't export until you're on a paid plan.

Comparison table

No Zoom bot in Subanana; Otter, Fireflies, tl;dv, Read.ai, and Fathom all support Zoom as well as Teams.

So which Teams note taker should you pick?

• You want the best free option and you meet in English: Fathom (free-forever, unlimited) or Otter (300 free minutes, polished app).
• You want notes posted back into Teams for the whole team: Fireflies.
• You don't want a bot in the call: Krisp or tl;dv (both bot-free), or Otter's bot-free desktop mode.
• You want live, in-meeting engagement metrics: Read.ai.
• Your calls are noisy: Krisp, because it cleans the audio before transcribing.
• Your meetings are multilingual, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, or Korean — or you want to choose the summary model: Subanana.

For a platform-agnostic view of the same category — the best tools regardless of whether you're on Teams, Meet, or Zoom — see my best AI meeting transcription tools roundup. And if you're still deciding what a note taker should even capture, this breakdown of how AI captures decisions and action items covers the basics.

FAQ

Does Microsoft Teams have a built-in AI note taker?

Teams has a built-in transcript, and Microsoft Copilot can generate meeting summaries if your organisation licenses it. But Copilot is a paid per-seat add-on many admins haven't enabled, it runs on a single model you can't change, and the native transcript is limited on languages and structure. A dedicated note taker adds richer summaries, broader language support, model choice, and exportable transcripts.

What's the best free AI note taker for Teams?

For unlimited free use in English, Fathom (free-forever, unlimited recordings) and Otter (300 minutes a month) are the strongest. tl;dv is also free-forever but caps full AI notes after the first several meetings. Read.ai's free plan covers 5 meetings a month.

Can I get an AI note taker for Teams without a bot joining the call?

Yes. Krisp captures Teams meetings at the device level with no bot. tl;dv and Fathom both offer bot-free desktop recording, and Otter has a bot-free desktop mode too. These sidestep the visible-bot problem and admin policies that block external bots.

Which AI note taker handles multilingual or Cantonese Teams meetings best?

Subanana is built for this — 80+ languages, Cantonese-first, with best-model speech-to-text routing per language and handling for mixed Cantonese-English meetings. Krisp covers 17 languages and Fireflies advertises 100+, but the US-first tools generally treat non-English depth as secondary.

Does Subanana work with Zoom?

No. Subanana runs meeting bots for Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, but not Zoom. If your meetings are on Zoom, the other tools in this list support it; for Teams or Meet, Subanana's bot auto-joins from your calendar.

Will an AI note taker show live captions during my Teams meeting?

It depends on the tool. Subanana's Teams bot is post-production — it records the meeting and builds the transcript and summary afterward, rather than displaying live captions in the call. If you specifically need live, audience-facing captions or real-time translation for an event, that's a different feature; see how to set up live captions for an event.

Try it on your own meetings

The fastest way to choose is to run two or three of these on the same Teams meeting and read the transcripts side by side — accuracy on your accents, your jargon, and your languages is what matters, not a vendor's headline number. If your meetings are multilingual or you want to pick the summary model, start with Subanana's meeting transcription or create a free account and run it on your next call.