The short version: Otter, Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv all have genuine free tiers in 2026, each with a different catch: minutes capped, storage capped, or your data used to train the model unless you opt out. Pick based on how many meetings you run in a month, not on whichever one has the flashiest homepage.
What "free" means right now
Every note taker on this list is free at the point of use. None of them are free of cost to your business, because the cost shows up somewhere else: your data, your storage, or the ten minutes you lose when a meeting cuts off mid-sentence because you hit a cap. That's not a criticism, it's how the business model works. Free tiers exist to get you hooked, and paid tiers exist to remove the friction you've just felt.
If you run one client call a week, free will cover you comfortably. If you're doing back-to-back discovery calls, sales demos and internal standups, you'll hit a wall inside a fortnight and end up paying anyway, just later than you expected.
The actual free options in 2026
These are the tools with genuine no-card-required free plans, based on what each vendor publishes and what's realistic for a small business to run on month after month.
- Otter.ai - free plan gives you around 300 transcription minutes a month, with a 30-minute cap per conversation. Fine for short check-ins, not for a two-hour workshop.
- Fireflies.ai - free plan includes unlimited recording but caps stored transcripts around 800 minutes total, so older meetings get pushed out or locked behind a paywall.
- Fathom - one of the more generous free tiers, with recording, transcript and AI summary included at no cost, funded by upselling team features like CRM sync.
- tl;dv - free plan covers unlimited recordings for Zoom, Google Meet and Teams, with summaries, though longer-term storage and multi-language export sit behind the paid tier.
- Zoom AI Companion - included at no extra cost if you're already on a paid Zoom Pro, Business or Enterprise account, but not available on Zoom's free plan itself, which is a detail a lot of "free tools" lists gloss over.
- Google Meet's built-in note-taking - bundled into certain Google Workspace Business tiers, not a free consumer option, so don't expect it if you're on a personal Gmail account.
If you want the fuller breakdown, including how these stack up on accuracy and speaker labelling rather than just price, I've compared them in this rundown of the best transcription tools for meetings and podcasts in 2026.
A worked example: picking the right free tool
Say you run a small marketing consultancy with two people, and between you, you're on client calls roughly eight hours a week, split across four or five separate meetings. You try Otter first because it's the name everyone mentions. Within twelve days you've burned through the 300-minute monthly allowance, because a single 90-minute strategy session eats nearly a third of it, and you still had three more calls booked that week.
You switch to Fathom instead, because the unlimited recording means you're not watching a countdown clock during a client conversation, which is exactly when you don't want to be distracted. The trade-off is that Fathom pushes you towards its paid tier the moment you want notes synced automatically into a CRM, which for a two-person business you can live without for now and do manually in five minutes after each call.
That's the actual decision most small businesses make: not "which tool is best" in the abstract, but "which limit will annoy me the least given how I work." Map your real weekly meeting hours against each tool's cap before you commit, not after.
There's a step by step guide on how to use Copilot in Teams meetings.
The catch nobody puts in the headline
Here's the part that gets left out of most "free AI note taker" roundups: a bot joining your call to record and transcribe it is a data processing event, and in the UK and EU that means consent rules apply, not just to you but to everyone else on the call. If a bot with a name like "Fireflies Notetaker" or "Otter Assistant" silently joins a client meeting and nobody explicitly agreed to being recorded and analysed by a third-party AI, you're on shakier legal ground than most people using these tools realise. I've written about exactly how that risk plays out on ordinary sales and client calls in this piece on the legal risk hiding in your AI notetaker, and the consent gap specifically in this one on what's happening on your client calls without anyone agreeing to it.
The uncomfortable bit is that free tiers make this worse, not better, because free-tier data is often exactly what trains the underlying model unless you dig into settings and switch it off. Paid enterprise tiers usually strip that out by contract. Free ones frequently don't, or bury the opt-out three menus deep. If you're recording calls with client financial information, health data, or anything commercially sensitive, read the privacy settings before your first call, not after a complaint lands.
There's a lot more in my directory of free AI tools.
How to set one up in ten minutes
Whichever tool you pick, the setup is nearly identical:
- Sign up with your work email, not a personal one, so transcripts stay tied to your business account rather than scattered across logins.
- Connect your calendar (Google or Outlook) so the bot joins automatically instead of you inviting it manually every time.
- Turn off auto-join for external client calls and switch it to manual, so you can tell people it's on before it starts recording.
- Check the data settings and opt out of "improve our AI" or "model training" if that toggle exists, which on most of these tools it does.
- Add one line to your calendar invite or meeting agenda: "This call will be recorded and transcribed by [tool name] for note-taking purposes." That sentence alone covers most of the basic consent requirement and takes five seconds to type.
If you'd rather keep recording entirely in-house without a third party touching the audio, you can record the meeting screen yourself using open-source tools and run the transcript through a separate offline service, which I've laid out step by step in this guide to recording your screen for free with open source software. It's more manual, but nothing leaves your machine until you decide it does.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
I've put together a guide on how to record a Google Meet call.
When free stops being worth it
Free tiers are built to make you feel like you're getting away with something, and for a while, you are. The point where it stops making sense is usually one of three things: you're regularly hitting the minute or storage cap and losing notes mid-meeting, you need transcripts searchable across months rather than weeks, or you're on calls sensitive enough that the free tier's data handling worries you. At that point a £10 to £20 a month plan (roughly what Otter, Fireflies and Fathom charge at their entry paid tier) buys you unlimited minutes, longer storage, and usually a real business-grade data agreement.
Don't upgrade because a sales email told you to. Upgrade because you've counted your real usage and the free plan is visibly costing you time or risk.
For a practical look at how to summarise a document with AI, including prompts and privacy checks, see my guide.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a truly free AI note taker with no time limit?
Fathom currently comes closest, offering unlimited recording and AI summaries on its free plan, though features like CRM integration and longer archived storage sit behind a paid upgrade.
Can I use an AI note taker for free on Zoom's free plan?
Not through Zoom's own AI Companion, which requires a paid Zoom Pro, Business or Enterprise account. A third-party bot like Otter, Fireflies or tl;dv can still join a free Zoom call and record it independently of Zoom's own tools.
Do free AI note takers use my meeting data to train their models?
Some do unless you opt out in settings, so check the privacy or data controls before your first recorded call, particularly if you're discussing client information you wouldn't want feeding into a third party's training set.
Is it legal to record a client meeting with a free AI note taker without telling them?
No, not reliably. UK and EU rules generally expect clear consent when a call is recorded and processed by AI, so tell attendees in the invite or verbally at the start rather than letting the bot join silently.
Anyone with a story to tell here should read the LLM contributor page first.
Sources worth reading
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