Put an End to the Nightmare That Is Meeting Minutes

Difficulty: Apprentice

You finished the OAC meeting. Now you've got to write up what happened, figure out who needs to see it, and get it out before everyone forgets what they agreed to. That's an hour of your day, minimum.

AI meeting tools promise to handle this for you—record the meeting, transcribe it, pull out action items, and email everything to attendees. Some of them actually deliver. Here's what works and what doesn't.

How These Tools Actually Work

Every AI meeting tool follows the same basic pattern:

1. A bot joins your video call (or you record in-person with a phone app)
2. The AI transcribes who said what
3. It generates a summary with action items
4. It sends the notes to participants

The catch: none of these tools were built for construction. They're designed for sales calls and corporate meetings. That means they'll stumble on "RFI," confuse "MEP" with a person's name, and have no idea what "substantial completion" means until you teach them.

The Tools Worth Considering

Fireflies.ai — Best All-Around Option

Cost: Free tier with limits, $10-18/month for real use

Fireflies works across Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet regardless of who's hosting—handy when you're joining an architect's call one day and an owner's the next. It handles 100+ languages, which matters if you've got multilingual crews.

The integration list is massive: Slack, Notion, Asana, Trello, Google Drive, plus Zapier for custom workflows. You could theoretically pipe meeting notes into Procore, though it takes some setup.

The honest take: Accuracy runs 90-95% in good conditions. You'll still spend 10-15 minutes cleaning up transcripts, especially the first few meetings before it learns your project vocabulary.

Circleback — Best Accuracy, Premium Price

Cost: $25-30/month per person

Circleback doesn't send a bot to your meeting—it records through a desktop app. Some folks prefer that since there's no awkward "Fred's AI Bot has joined" notification. Speaker identification is excellent, and it learns voices across meetings.

The honest take: At $25-30 per seat, costs stack up fast on a project team. The accuracy is worth it if documentation matters (litigation risk, complex owner relationships), but it's overkill for internal coordination.

Otter.ai — Budget Option with Tradeoffs

Cost: Free (300 minutes/month), $8-10/month for more

Otter's free tier is generous enough for occasional use. Real-time transcription during meetings is useful—you can watch the transcript build while people talk and flag errors on the spot.

The honest take: Accuracy drops hard with background noise or accents. One review mentioned Otter labeling HVAC noise as "speaker 3." Custom vocabulary (up to 800 terms on paid plans) helps, but it requires upfront work.

Microsoft Teams Transcription — If You're Already Paying

Cost: Included with Teams, Copilot summaries cost $30/month extra

If your company runs on Microsoft 365, transcription is already built in. Copilot adds AI summaries and action items. Everything saves to OneDrive automatically.

The honest take: Accuracy hovers around 80-85%—noticeably worse than dedicated tools. External meeting participants (owners, architects, subs) don't automatically get access to transcripts. Fine for internal meetings, frustrating for OACs.

Fathom — Great Free Tier, No Mobile

Cost: Free unlimited recordings, $15/month for extras

Fathom's free tier has no minute caps—record as many meetings as you want. Summaries arrive within 30 seconds of hanging up. The catch: desktop only. No mobile app means no jobsite recording.

The honest take: Perfect for PMs who run most meetings from an office or truck. Useless for field documentation.

tl;dv — Good Balance

Cost: Free tier, $18/month for full features

Similar to Fireflies with slightly better accuracy in testing (90-96%). The multi-meeting reports are interesting—you can analyze patterns across dozens of meetings to see what topics keep coming up.

The honest take: Mobile app exists but it's in beta. Interface takes getting used to. Solid choice if you want something between Otter's budget option and Circleback's premium.

Getting Minutes to the Right People

The distribution features vary more than you'd expect:

Auto-email to attendees: Circleback, Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, and tl;dv all do this. Teams and Google Meet share within their ecosystems but external attendees need manual handling.

Export formats: Most tools offer PDF and text export. You'll end up downloading PDFs and uploading to Procore/Buildertrend manually—there's no native integration with construction software yet.

Zapier workarounds: Fireflies, Otter, and tl;dv all connect to Zapier. You can build automations like "when meeting ends, create document in Procore project files." It works, but it's not plug-and-play.

Matching Tools to Meeting Types

OAC Meetings

These need the best documentation—design decisions, budget impacts, who committed to what. Use Fireflies or Circleback. Before your first meeting, load custom vocabulary: project name, key team members' names spelled phonetically, acronyms your team uses.

Export as PDF for the official project record. The AI summary is convenient; the searchable transcript is what actually matters when someone claims they never agreed to that change order.

Sub Coordination Meetings

Multiple trades talking at once, each with their own jargon. Speaker identification matters here—you need to know the HVAC sub said Thursday, not the electrician.

Pro tip: At meeting start, have everyone state their name and company for the transcript. Helps the AI sort out who's who.

Safety/Toolbox Talks

AI transcription handles the content, but OSHA documentation typically requires attendance signatures. No meeting tool does that. You'll need to combine AI notes with a safety app (Safety Meeting App, Procore Safety, even a paper sign-in sheet) for complete documentation.

Internal Team Meetings

Any of these tools work fine. Pick based on your existing tech stack—Teams if you're a Microsoft shop, Google Meet's built-in notes if you're on Workspace, Fathom if you want free and mostly work from a desk.

The Jobsite Problem

Here's where AI meeting tools hit their limits. Background noise from equipment, wind, echoes in unfinished spaces—accuracy drops to 70% or worse.

Your options:

Krisp ($8-12/month) specializes in noise cancellation. It filters audio before transcription, so the AI gets cleaner input. Worth trying for field recording.

Hardware helps: A decent lapel mic on the key speaker beats phone recording. External microphones aren't sexy but they work.

Accept the limits: Some field conversations just can't be reliably transcribed. If you're standing next to a concrete pump, take written notes.

Emerging option: A tool called Benetics launched in 2025, specifically built for construction sites. It's mostly in Europe right now but expanding to the US. Worth watching.

Teaching the AI Your Language

Every tool supports custom vocabulary—a list of terms it should recognize. This is not optional for construction use. Before your first project meeting, add:

• Project name and number
• Owner, architect, key sub company names
• Common acronyms: RFI, ASI, CO, GC, MEP
• Trade-specific terms for your project type
• Your cost codes if you reference them in meetings

Most tools support 100-800 custom terms. You won't need that many, but the 50-100 terms specific to your current project make a real difference.

Recording Consent: Don't Skip This

Two-party consent states require everyone's permission: California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Washington, and about a dozen others.

One-party consent states (~38 of them) let you record if you're a participant.

For multi-state projects: The strictest law applies. California owner joining a Texas contractor's meeting? California rules govern.

The simple fix: Announce at meeting start that you're recording and transcribing. Add it to meeting invites. Nobody will object to documented meeting notes—they'll appreciate not having to take their own.

What to Expect

Even the best tools need cleanup. Budget 10-15 minutes after a one-hour meeting to:

• Fix misheard technical terms
• Verify action items are attributed to the right people
• Remove filler that made it into the summary
• Format for your documentation standards

That's still way faster than writing minutes from scratch. The AI handles the 80% that's tedious; you handle the 20% that requires judgment.

Start Simple

Don't overcomplicate this. Pick one tool and use it for a month:

• Mostly office-based? Try Fathom (free) or Fireflies ($10/month)
• Microsoft shop? Use Teams transcription you're already paying for
• Need mobile recording? Fireflies or Otter with their phone apps
• Premium documentation needs? Circleback

After a month, you'll know whether automated transcription fits your workflow—and you'll have figured out which features actually matter for your projects.