Save Time with an AI Note-Taker 🦄
New AI note-takers do a superb job of transcribing and summarizing meetings. Receiving an automated, accurate transcript + summary frees you up to participate fully without having to scribble down details. Read on for three recommended AI apps and their distinct capabilities.
4149
Summary: 4149 sends you a summary Google Doc right after you end a meeting.
Special Feature: 🦋 Natural language queries. You can type questions into the summary doc just as you’d ask a friend who attended the meeting. Example: I typed a question into a 4149 summary about someone’s comment on burnout. (I hadn’t heard their answer). In another case, I asked what numbers someone had cited as evidence of traction. Try it out on my demo summary.
How to get started: Go to 4149.ai to sign up for free. Use code WONDER-TOOLS to join the private beta (limited spots). Once you've signed in, invite teammate@4149.ai to your meeting on Zoom, Google Meet or other Microsoft Teams. Afterwards, 4149 will email you the summary GDoc.
Wow feature: Identifies humor + good quotes. 😳 I asked 4149 to pull out notable quotes and funny moments. I’ve been stunned at how well it manages that feat.
Why I love this: I can easily track down and share key points from any meeting or class. I can retrieve something I’ve forgotten. Weeks later, I can refresh my memory about a meeting or ask a new question of the transcript. The summaries are shareable, so others can add their own queries. Co-founder and CEO Adrian Vatchinsky told me users will be able to query a series of meetings or teaching sessions for patterns, themes or next steps.
Pricing: Free for now; future pricing not yet announced
Platforms: Zoom, Google Meet & Microsoft Teams
Caveats: Not open to the public yet; won’t yet work on Webex, Around or other niche meeting platforms; not designed for in-person meetings; meeting summaries are brief, not exhaustive.
Supernormal
Summary: Supernormal provides stellar, shareable meeting summaries. It doesn’t support natural-language queries yet, but it can record video of your meetings and provide a clickable transcript so you can jump to key moments. Bloks and 4149 don’t record video of meetings.
Unique feature: Templates allow you to customize a meeting summary for one-on-one meetings, performance reviews, presentation feedback or other scenarios.
How it works: Install a Chrome plug-in and Supernormal can attend and record your events on Google Meet, Zoom, and Teams.
Pricing: Free for 20 meetings per month on Google Meet, plus 10 meetings per team member; $22/month for 1,000 minutes of meetings on Zoom, Meet or Teams.
Caveats: Some meeting platforms aren’t supported; can’t yet query meetings; not designed for in-person meetings.
Explore further: Watch the company’s 2-minute video overview
Bloks
Summary: In addition to transcribing and summarizing online meetings, Bloks can connect to your email and calendar. That enables you to link meeting notes with email threads. Or gather summary notes from all your meetings related to a particular person, topic or organization.
Special features: 🦋 Bloks can perform AI actions on your summaries. You can ask it to generate an email, blog post or Tweet from summarized event notes, for example. Bloks also works well on mobile as a standalone note-taking app, unlike 4149 and Supernormal, which are designed for desktop use.
Creative uses: In addition to recording meetings, you can use Bloks to dictate ideas. It will summarize your thoughts. You can convert the summary into an email message or a blog/newsletter post. A screenshot button lets you capture & store visuals. Co-founder Marc Gingras told me that Bloks aims to make meeting notes more useful and to reduce the need to use a bunch of different apps.
How it works: Hit record on the app when you're in a meeting. Unlike other services, no bot attends your meeting, so Bloks works with any meeting platform. You can run the app on your laptop or phone.
Pricing: Free while in beta. When the service launches it’ll be free for unlimited transcriptions and summaries, and $20/month for premium AI features.
Caveats: No video or audio recordings; no customizable templates; no shareable links to summaries yet like the ones provided by 4149 and Supernormal.
Alternatives
Otter.ai and Grain.co are two additional meeting transcription tools that work well. At the moment, I prefer these other three summarization tools because of the quality of the summaries they provide and other features detailed above.
Head-to-Head Test Check out how these tools fared
I recorded my thoughts about AI meeting summaries as a demonstration.
Compare the results: 4149 | Supernormal | Bloks | Otter | 👁️👁️
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Thanks for this! As a solopreneur who is also a writer and speaker, and doing volunteer work on an executive board, I can see these tools really helping.
Hi Jeremy, thanks for all your Wonder-Work. When presenting speech related tools, you might also consider indicating which ones work in other languages than English.