You don't need a technical background or a big budget to start using AI for meeting notes. Here's how to go from zero to your first AI-generated meeting summary in a few minutes.
Option A: Use a cloud notetaker (easiest)
Sign up for Otter.ai, Fathom or Fireflies. Connect it to your Google or Outlook calendar. When you join a meeting, the bot joins automatically and produces a transcript and summary afterwards, emailed to you within minutes of the call ending. This works without any setup during the meeting itself.
Option B: Use Ledgeur (most private)
Open Ledgeur in your browser. Click 'Start transcribing' and grant microphone access. The Whisper model loads in your browser (first-time ~30 seconds). Click start when your meeting begins. The transcript appears in real time. At the end, click 'Summarise' for an AI-generated recap. No account needed, no data uploaded.
What makes a good AI meeting note
- State decisions explicitly during the meeting ('We have decided to...') so the AI can capture them.
- Name action-item owners directly ('Sarah will send the proposal by Tuesday').
- Avoid acronyms and internal jargon the AI won't know — or add a glossary to the prompt/template.
- Do a 2-minute review of the AI output before sending; fix proper nouns and names.
Sharing the notes
Export to a Google Doc, paste into Notion or Confluence, or copy the action items into your project management tool. Most cloud notetakers have direct integrations with Notion, Asana and Slack. With Ledgeur, copy and paste works fine — the output is clean Markdown that converts to any format.