Turn a Meeting Recording into a Summary
Meeting summarizer takes a Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet recording (or any audio or video file) and turns it into a short summary with action items, decisions, and speaker labels. Upload the file or paste a transcript, and the summary is ready a few minutes later.
A summary is not the same thing as a transcript. The transcript is the full word-for-word text; the summary pulls out what changed, what was decided, and who owes what, so a reader can catch up in a couple of minutes instead of scrolling a full transcript. 13,230 meeting recordings were summarized on ScreenApp in the last 90 days.
What you get with every recording:
- Action items with an owner and deadline, listed separately from the discussion
- Decisions listed with the reasoning behind them
- A transcript with speaker labels, in 100+ languages
- chapters with timestamps
- AI chat with any recording, so you can ask what was said about a topic
- Export as PDF, DOCX, TXT, SRT and VTT
- Free plan: 2 transcriptions of recordings up to 45 minutes each, with AI chat on it
This page covers the recording you already have. For live capture during the call, ScreenApp also has a browser meeting recorder that records Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams with no bot in the call, or a calendar bot for Zoom and Google Meet that joins and records for you.
See a real meeting summary
Below is a real ScreenApp summary from a 38-minute two-person conversation, the format that matches 1:1 calls, candidate interviews, and customer-discovery meetings. The summarizer detected six topic shifts as the conversation moved between subjects and rendered a 5-page document a manager could forward to the team without editing.
For larger meetings, the summarizer applies the same approach with a speaker label on each paragraph. Action items and decisions get pulled into a separate section at the top.
How to Summarize a Meeting
- Upload the recording or paste a transcript: The summarizer accepts MP4, MOV, M4A, MP3, and WAV files exported from Zoom, Teams, or Google Meet, or a pasted URL. You can also paste transcript text directly if you already have one.
- Let it process: The audio is transcribed with speaker labels, and the AI reads the conversation for action items, decisions, and open questions.
- Read or export: The summary lists action items with owners, decisions with the reasoning, and open questions flagged for follow-up. Export as PDF, DOCX, TXT, SRT and VTT.
Summary quality follows transcript quality. A recording with one clear audio track transcribes well; a room mic picking up several people talking over each other will have gaps, and the summary inherits them. See how we measure accuracy.
Meeting Summarizer vs Other Apps
| Feature | ScreenApp | Otter.ai | Read.ai | NoteGPT | Krisp |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Approach | Upload after the call | Bot joins the call | joins as a bot, or records bot-free from its desktop or mobile app | Upload after the call | No bot; works in the background on your device |
| Free plan | 2 transcriptions, up to 45 min each | 300 min/month | 5 meeting transcripts/month | 15 quotas/month | No free plan, 7-day trial |
| Action items | action items with an owner and deadline, and decisions listed separately | Included, automatically assigned | Included | Included, with timestamps | Included |
| Languages | 100+ | 6 | 16 | 60+ | 16 |
| Paid plan | $19/month annual | $8.33/month annual | $15/month annual | $9/month annual | $8/month annual |
Sources, checked 2026-09-16: screenapp.io/accuracy#languages, ScreenApp pricing, read.ai/articles/best-ai-note-taking-app-for-microsoft-teams, krisp.ai/ai-meeting-summary/google-meet, otter.ai/pricing, read.ai/pricing, notegpt.io, krisp.ai/pricing/, otter.ai, read.ai, notegpt.io/ai-meeting-summarizer, notegpt.io/youtube-video-summarizer, notegpt.io/pricing
- vs Otter.ai: Otter sends a bot to every meeting and caps the free plan at 300 minutes a month. ScreenApp works from a recording you upload after the call, so there is no bot on the participant list for this step.
- vs Read.ai: Read joins as a bot, or records bot-free from its desktop or mobile app. Its free plan gives 5 meeting transcripts a month before Pro at $15 a month annual.
- vs NoteGPT: NoteGPT also works from an uploaded recording, with 15 quotas a month shared across its tools before Pro at $9 a month annual. ScreenApp’s free plan comes with AI chat included.
- vs Krisp: Krisp No bot; works in the background on your device, but it has no ongoing free plan, only a 7-day trial before $8 a month annual.
Who Uses a Meeting Summarizer
Engineering managers running daily or twice-weekly standups across distributed teams use the summary to track what each engineer committed to, which tickets came up as blockers, and what got decided about scope or priority. It replaces retyping the same status update for a skip-level.
Sales managers reviewing discovery and demo calls from their reps get a one-screen view of objections raised, competitors mentioned, and the next step the rep committed to. Reading several summaries in twenty minutes beats listening to the same hours of audio. Audio-only call recordings work the same way through the AI audio summarizer.
Founders who get pulled into investor calls or customer escalations miss internal meetings constantly. The summary lets them catch up on a 60-minute product sync in a couple of minutes and respond by Slack or email instead of asking someone to brief them.
Consultants who bill hourly need a record of what was discussed and decided in each client meeting. The summary timestamps decisions and action items, which turns directly into a time-entry narrative for an invoice.
Project managers tracking decisions and tasks across recurring meetings pull the summary into their own tracker instead of re-listening for what was agreed.
If a formal minutes-of-meeting document with an attendee list and numbered resolutions is what you need, the meeting minutes generator builds that structure; this page gives you the shorter summary-only version.
