What is AI Meeting Assistant?

What Is AI Meeting Assistant?

An AI Meeting Assistant is software that uses artificial intelligence to attend, record, transcribe, and summarise meetings on behalf of participants. Instead of relying on someone to take manual notes, these tools capture everything that is said, identify the most important points, and produce structured summaries that participants can reference after the meeting ends.

The technology has evolved rapidly since the widespread shift to remote and hybrid work. What started as simple transcription has grown into intelligent meeting management that understands context, recognises speakers, tracks commitments, and integrates with project management and communication tools. For businesses, this means fewer lost action items, better meeting accountability, and significant time savings across the organisation.

How It Works

AI Meeting Assistants combine several technologies to deliver their capabilities:

Speech Recognition and Transcription

The foundation of any AI meeting tool is its ability to convert spoken language into accurate text in real time. Modern systems use advanced speech recognition models that can handle multiple accents, overlapping speakers, and background noise. Leading tools achieve transcription accuracy rates above 90 percent for clear audio in supported languages.

Speaker Identification

AI meeting tools can distinguish between different speakers in a conversation, labelling each person's contributions separately. This is essential for creating useful transcripts where you can quickly see who said what, who committed to which action item, and who raised specific concerns.

Intelligent Summarisation

Rather than presenting participants with a raw transcript that can run to dozens of pages, AI meeting assistants use natural language processing to identify key themes, decisions, questions, and action items. They produce concise summaries that capture the essence of the meeting in a fraction of the reading time.

Action Item Extraction

One of the most valuable features is the automatic detection of commitments and tasks. When someone says "I will send the proposal by Friday" or "Let us schedule a follow-up with the client next week," the AI recognises these as action items and logs them separately, often with assigned owners and deadlines.

Integration with Business Tools

Leading AI meeting assistants integrate with calendars, project management platforms like Asana and Jira, communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams, and CRM systems like Salesforce. This allows meeting outcomes to flow directly into the tools teams already use, rather than sitting in isolated notes that no one revisits.

Why It Matters for Business

Meetings represent one of the largest investments of time in any organisation, and one of the most poorly managed. Research from Microsoft and Harvard Business School estimates that the average knowledge worker spends over 50 percent of their workweek in meetings, yet retention of meeting content drops dramatically within 24 hours.

Recapturing lost productivity: When employees attend a one-hour meeting, the productive output is often just three to five key decisions or action items. Without an AI assistant, someone must either take notes during the meeting (reducing their participation) or rely on memory, which is unreliable. AI meeting assistants capture everything, letting all participants fully engage in the discussion.

Accountability and follow-through: A persistent problem in business is that action items agreed in meetings are forgotten or disputed afterward. AI-generated records create a clear, searchable log of who committed to what and when. This improves accountability and reduces the need for follow-up meetings to clarify what was decided.

Onboarding and knowledge transfer: New team members can review past meeting transcripts and summaries to get up to speed on projects, decisions, and context. This is far more efficient than relying on colleagues to verbally recap weeks or months of discussions.

Cross-timezone collaboration: For organisations operating across Southeast Asian markets and beyond, not everyone can attend every meeting. AI meeting summaries allow colleagues in different time zones to stay informed without sitting through recorded sessions. A team member in Ho Chi Minh City can quickly review the key outcomes of a meeting held during Singapore business hours.

Key Examples and Use Cases

The AI Meeting Assistant market includes several well-established players:

• Otter.ai: One of the earliest AI meeting tools, known for accurate transcription, real-time collaboration features, and integration with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Popular with small to mid-size businesses.
• Fireflies.ai: Offers transcription, summary, and search across all meetings with strong CRM integration. Widely used by sales teams to automatically log customer conversations.
• Granola: A newer entrant focused on privacy-first meeting notes. It runs locally on the user's device and combines what was said with the user's own typed notes for contextually rich summaries.
• Microsoft Copilot in Teams: Built directly into Microsoft Teams, it provides real-time transcription, summaries, and action items within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. A natural choice for enterprises already invested in Microsoft tools.
• Google Gemini in Meet: Google's AI assistant integrated into Google Meet, offering similar capabilities for Google Workspace users.

In Southeast Asia, these tools are particularly valuable for companies like Grab and GoTo that operate across multiple countries with teams speaking different languages. AI meeting assistants that support multilingual transcription help bridge language gaps in regional meetings. A meeting conducted partly in English and partly in Bahasa Indonesia can be transcribed and summarised in a single, coherent document.

Getting Started

Adopting an AI Meeting Assistant is one of the lower-risk, higher-reward AI investments a business can make:

1. Identify your meeting pain points: Are action items being lost? Are too many people attending meetings just to stay informed? Are follow-up meetings happening because no one remembers what was decided? Understanding your specific problems helps you choose the right tool and measure success.

2. Select a tool that fits your communication stack: If your organisation uses Microsoft Teams, explore Copilot first. If you use Google Meet, start with Gemini. For organisations using multiple platforms, a cross-platform tool like Otter.ai or Fireflies offers more flexibility.

3. Address privacy and compliance early: AI meeting tools record conversations, which raises important privacy considerations. Ensure your chosen tool complies with local data protection regulations, including those in Singapore, Indonesia, and other ASEAN markets. Establish clear policies about meeting recording consent and data retention.

4. Start with a specific team or meeting type: Rather than rolling out across the entire organisation, begin with a team that has frequent, action-oriented meetings, such as sales, project management, or executive leadership. Demonstrate value with a small group before expanding.

5. Establish habits around meeting outputs: The tool is only valuable if people actually use the summaries and action items it produces. Encourage teams to review AI-generated summaries, confirm action items, and integrate them into their project management workflows. The technology works best when paired with disciplined follow-through.