Search "Zoom AI notetaker" and Zoom will hand you three different answers. The support portal points you to My Notes. The marketing pages talk about AI Companion and its meeting summaries. And there's a third tool — in-person transcription, formerly just called Transcribe — that deliberately switches itself off the moment a Zoom meeting starts. All three are real, they overlap, and none of them is quite the same thing as the others.

If you just want to know whether Zoom can take your meeting notes for you: yes, it can. This post untangles what each feature actually does, how to turn them on, what you'll really pay, and when a third-party notetaker is the better call.

Three tools, one search term

My Notes is Zoom's current AI notetaker, and it's the closest thing to what people mean by "Zoom AI notetaker." It transcribes the conversation in real time and produces a summary, key takeaways, and action items. It works in Zoom meetings, but also joins Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls and captures in-person conversations. Notes and transcripts are stored in your Zoom account. You need the latest Zoom client — version 6.7.5 or higher — for all of its features (Zoom's note-taking page).

Meeting Summary with AI Companion is the older, host-facing feature. The host starts it during a call and Zoom emails a written summary afterward — to the host only, to your organization, or to all invitees, depending on how the host configures it. It lives alongside the newer My Notes rather than replacing it, which is why Zoom's own documentation reads like two products stitched together.

In-person transcription captures face-to-face conversations and voice notes. It does not connect to Zoom meeting transcripts or AI summaries, and it stops automatically when it detects a Zoom meeting. It's a separate tool for a different job.

The naming will probably keep changing. For now, My Notes is the answer to most "Zoom AI notetaker" searches.

How to turn it on

Everything ships off by default. An account admin has to enable the features before anyone can use them.

For Meeting Summary with AI Companion, an admin signs into the Zoom web portal, opens Admin Center, goes to Settings, then Zoom AI, and toggles "Meeting summary with AI." Individual users can manage some settings if the admin hasn't locked them at the account level (Zoom's setup guide).

To actually use it in a meeting, the host (or co-host) hovers over the AI Companion diamond in the top-right corner, ticks "Meeting summary," optionally ticks "Generate transcript," and clicks Start. Participants are told the meeting is being summarized, and only the host can start or stop it. Summaries arrive by email and in Zoom Chat after the call.

For My Notes, you open the My Notes panel in the meeting window, jot down quick thoughts manually, and turn on transcription to let Zoom capture the spoken conversation. You manage its settings — transcription permissions, voice activity detection — under Settings, then Notes, then My Notes in the web portal.

The key operational detail: the host controls the meeting summary, not the AI itself. If you're a participant on a sales call and the host never starts AI Companion, you get no summary from Zoom at all.

What it costs

Zoom gates the notetaker by plan, and the free tier is genuinely thin:

Free (Workplace Basic): My Notes and meeting summaries for 3 uses per month, plus 20 AI queries a month. Fine for a demo, useless for a real meeting schedule.
Zoom Workplace paid plans (from $14.16 per user per month): AI-powered meeting summaries and My Notes included.
My Notes standalone: from $8.33 per user per month if you only want the notetaker.

Meeting Summary with AI Companion requires a licensed user on a Zoom Workplace Pro plan or higher (or an active BAA). So the "free AI notetaker" people expect is really a three-meetings-a-month trial unless you're already paying for Zoom Workplace (Zoom's pricing).

Does Zoom train on your meetings?

This is the question that keeps showing up in the autocomplete — "zoom ai notetaker privacy" and "security" sit right behind the feature searches. Zoom's public position is specific: it does not use your audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like content (polls, whiteboard, reactions) to train its own or third-party AI models.

The mechanics: Zoom uses a "federated" approach that mixes its own large language models with third-party ones, including OpenAI and Anthropic. When a third-party model handles your data, Zoom says those providers are under zero-data-retention agreements — they don't keep your content and can't use it to train their models. Data may be processed in US-based data centers (Zoom's data-handling article).

That's Zoom's commitment, and it's more specific than a lot of AI vendors manage. It's still worth reading the Zoom AI Whitepaper if you handle regulated data — several universities and enterprises restrict Zoom AI Companion for HIPAA, Social Security, or credit-card content regardless.

The limits nobody mentions

Zoom's notetaker is good at what it does, but it's worth knowing where it stops:

Host-only control for summaries. A participant can't start a meeting summary. On a prospect call, you're dependent on whoever is hosting.
No breakout rooms. Meeting Summary doesn't run inside Zoom breakout rooms, so sub-group conversations go uncaptured.
Language coverage is uneven. Meeting summaries support 30+ languages, but My Notes transcription currently supports 9.
Summaries stay in Zoom. They're stored in Zoom Hub and Zoom Chat, not synced to your CRM, your project tracker, or a searchable knowledge base. You can forward them, but they don't move on their own.
Admin gates. If your organization's admin hasn't enabled AI features, none of this exists for you until they do.

When to keep Zoom's, when to bring your own

If you already pay for Zoom Workplace and just want a recap of internal standups and syncs, Zoom's built-in notetaker is genuinely fine — the summary quality is solid and the price is right (zero marginal cost).

It gets less fine in three situations:

You're the guest, not the host. Sales and customer-success teams live on other people's calendars. If the host doesn't start AI Companion, Zoom gives you nothing. A third-party notetaker that joins as its own participant — like Meetbook — captures the call regardless of who's hosting or which platform it's on.
You need the notes to go somewhere. Zoom stores summaries in Zoom. If action items need to land in Salesforce, HubSpot, or a shared knowledge base, a notetaker with CRM sync saves you the manual copy-paste. Meetbook syncs notes and action items into Salesforce and HubSpot directly.
You need to search across meetings. Zoom summaries live per-meeting. A searchable meeting knowledge base lets you answer "what did we decide about pricing in March?" without opening fifteen emails.

Zoom's notetaker is a real feature now, not a checkbox — and it keeps improving. But it's built for people who stay inside Zoom's walls. The moment your meetings sprawl across Google Meet, Teams, and in-person, or your notes need to feed the tools you actually run the business in, a dedicated notetaker like Meetbook closes the gap Zoom doesn't try to.

If you're weighing notetakers more broadly, our Microsoft Teams notetaker guide and our explainer on speaker diarization — the tech that tells notes who said what — are the natural next reads.

Zoom AI Notetaker, Explained