Option 1: Google Meet’s own recording
Available on Business Standard and above, Enterprise, and Education Plus. In the call, open Activities, choose Recording, then Start recording. The file lands in the organiser’s Drive, in a Meet Recordings folder, usually within a few minutes of the call ending.
The transcript is a separate toggle. Turn on Transcripts in the same Activities panel and you get a Google Doc with speaker labels. It is competent and it is free with the plan. What it does not do is anything after that: there is no summary, no action items, and no way to search across meetings without opening each document.
Option 2: a notetaker bot
A bot joins the meeting as a participant, records, and produces a transcript and a summary. It works on any Google Workspace plan, including the free one, because it does not use Google’s recording feature at all. It is an attendee with a microphone.
The setup is the same across every tool in this category:
- 1Connect your Google Calendar, read-only, through OAuth.
- 2Choose which meetings the bot should join: everything, only meetings with external attendees, or only the ones you flag.
- 3The bot appears in the participant list when the meeting starts and leaves when the last person does.
The trade-off is that everyone can see it, which is the point. A bot that joins silently is a legal problem in every jurisdiction that requires all-party consent, and it is the reason Microsoft restricted third-party bots on Teams in 2026.
Option 3: record from your own browser tab
Screen-and-audio capture from the tab the meeting is running in. No extra participant, no calendar access, nothing for the other attendees to see except you saying that you are recording, which you still have to do.
This is the right choice for calls where an extra attendee would be intrusive, for meetings on platforms a bot cannot join, and for anyone whose IT policy forbids third-party participants. The catch is that it only records while that tab is open, so closing it mid-call ends the recording.
Option 4: a local recorder
A desktop application that captures system audio and your microphone. It does not care what the meeting software is, and it works for conversations that are not on a call at all. It also has the weakest speaker separation of the four, because it is mixing everyone else into one channel before the transcription ever sees them.
Which to pick
| Google’s own | Notetaker bot | Browser capture | Local recorder | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works on the free plan | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Needs to be the organiser | Yes | No | No | No |
| Visible to other attendees | Banner | Participant | No | No |
| Speaker labels | Yes | Yes | Yes | Weak |
| Summary and action items | No | Yes | Yes | Varies |
| In-person meetings | No | No | No | Yes |
If you are the organiser on a paid Workspace plan and you only need the file, use Google’s recording. There is no reason to add a tool. If what you need is the meeting turned into something, the bot and the browser capture are the two that produce it, and the difference between them is whether an extra participant in the room is acceptable.
Getting a transcript that is usable
Word accuracy on clean English audio sits in the mid-90s across every serious tool, because most of them use one of three speech engines. Where they differ is what they do with crosstalk, and there is nothing to be done about that at the software layer: two people talking over each other is hard for a person to follow too.
The things that measurably help are unglamorous. Ask people to use headsets, because laptop microphones pick up the speaker output and the diariser then has to separate a voice from its own echo. Start the meeting with names, which gives the speaker labels something to attach to. And keep the recording running through the last two minutes, which is where the commitments usually get made.