AI Meeting Note Taker, Sorted By Who Keeps Your Audio

Granola throws the audio away. Otter keeps it and trains on it. Microsoft Teams keeps it for 120 days and then moves it to a bin where it sits for another 93.

Those three sentences are the whole reason to read past the roundups, because not one of the pages ranking for ai meeting note taker says any of it. They compare integrations and per-seat prices. What they don't do is open the privacy policies, which is where the actual differences between these tools live.

Short version. If you want the audio gone the moment the transcript exists, Granola is the only one of the eight I read that says so in writing. If you want the recording kept but never trained on, Fireflies, tl;dv and Zoom's built-in assistant put that in their policies. If you're recording a room rather than a call, the Notes app on an iPhone 12 or later transcribes on the device and never uploads anything. Everything below is read off each vendor's own policy or admin documentation, loaded 15 September 2026, and I've quoted the wording where it matters.

The Retention Ledger

Nobody publishes this side by side, so I did. Rows run from the tool that keeps the least to the one whose policy says the least.

The two columns I'd look at first are the second and the fourth. Whether the audio survives at all, and whether the vendor is learning from it.

Reading The Table Honestly

Granola's line is unusually plain. "Any recordings of communications using our Services are captured only for the purposes of providing you a transcription. We do not retain or store such recordings once the transcription is created." That is a real commitment about the audio file, and it's the only one in the set.

It isn't the whole story, though. The same policy says Granola uses de-identified data to train its models and that you can opt out in account settings, with Enterprise workspaces opted out by default. Which means a personal account is opted in until you find the switch. Transcripts, not audio, but transcripts are the part with your words in them.

Otter is the opposite shape. Its policy lists "training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions (which may contain Personal Information)" as a purpose, and separately names data labeling providers "who provide annotation services and use the data we share to create training and evaluation data." Humans, annotating. I looked for a consumer opt-out toggle and the policy doesn't describe one. A help centre article on this exact question refused to load for me, so I can't tell you whether a toggle exists in the app. I can tell you the policy doesn't promise one. Custom retention shows up on the pricing page only under Enterprise.

Fireflies advertises a Zero Data Retention policy and it's worth reading what that phrase covers. The policy says meeting content "is not: (1) stored by any third-party vendor after processing; (2) accessed by any third-party vendor once the service is completed." Third-party vendor. Fireflies itself keeps your recordings in your account, which is why the free plan has a storage cap in minutes. The no-training line is separate and unambiguous, "We do not use personal information for AI model training and we contractually prohibit our vendors from using this information for their own model training," and I'd take that at face value. Just don't read "zero retention" as "nothing is stored."

Fathom trains in-house on de-identified meeting content, offers an opt-out in account settings, and refuses third parties like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google the same data. Deletion after closing the account is "commercially reasonable efforts" within 30 days, followed immediately by "we cannot guarantee." An honest hedge, and I prefer it to a firm number nobody audits.

The Free Tier Is The Retention Policy

On the paid tiers, retention is mostly "until you delete it." On the free tiers it's a number, and the number is doing more work than the marketing does.

tl;dv's policy has a retention table. Recordings and transcripts for a free user are kept 3 months. For a paying user, until account deletion. That's the clearest free-tier retention statement of the eight, and it comes from a company hosting in Germany and Finland that also lets you choose from account preferences whether the AI processing happens in the EU or the US. Transcription providers are listed as AssemblyAI and ElevenLabs, the summariser is Anthropic via Google Vertex. If you care where the words go, that's the most transparent policy in the set.

Fireflies Free gives 400 minutes of storage per team. Storage, not transcription. Transcription is unlimited. So the free plan is a rolling bucket, and once the bucket is full you delete old meetings to make room, which is a retention policy you administer by hand. Pro moves that to 8,000 minutes per seat and Business removes the cap.

Fathom's free plan says unlimited recordings and transcriptions and puts no retention window on them. The generous reading is that nothing expires. The other reading is that everything you ever record stays on a US server until you go and delete it yourself, because no automatic expiry is described.

Granola Basic is free with "limited meeting history," and the pricing page still puts no number on limited.

Teams Keeps It For 213 Days

If your organisation runs on Microsoft 365, the note taker you already have is the transcription toggle in Teams, and its retention behaviour is documented better than any of the standalone tools.

Transcripts are stored with the recording in the organizer's OneDrive for normal meetings and in the channel's SharePoint site for channel meetings. Transcription is on by default for new meeting policies. Recordings and transcripts have a default expiration of 120 days. When they expire they're moved to the recycle bin of wherever they were saved, and on a work or school account the recycle bin empties after 93 days unless an admin changed it.

So the default lifetime of a Teams transcript nobody touches is roughly 120 plus 93, about 213 days. Seven months. An admin can set the expiry anywhere from 1 day to 99,999, or to never through PowerShell, and changes only apply to new recordings, which means whatever was recorded under the old policy keeps the old clock.

Two consequences. If you're the organizer, the file is in your OneDrive and you can delete it whenever you like, which is more control than most third-party bots give a single user. If you're a participant, you have none, and the organizer's admin decides how long your voice sits in someone else's storage. Microsoft's docs make no training claim either way on the pages I read, so that cell stays blank rather than guessed.

Zoom's own AI Companion is the equivalent for Zoom shops. The product page says it comes at no additional cost with an eligible paid Workplace plan, and states flatly that Zoom "does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content" to train its models or third parties' models. Notes and transcripts land in Zoom Hub. The retention period isn't on that page and the trust page I tried returned a 404, so that cell is honestly empty.

The Tool Reddit Likes Has The Oldest Policy

The Reddit thread on the results page recommends Bluedot for in-person meetings because it records without a bot joining the call. Fair enough as a feature.

Its privacy policy is dated November 19, 2023, which makes it nearly three years old on the day I read it, and its retention line says personal information collected to perform the contract is kept "until such contract has been fully performed and for a period of up to four years thereafter." Four years after you stop paying. The training statement covers Google Workspace API data only and says nothing about recordings either way. Processors are split between AWS in Germany and Google, Zoom and Amplitude in the United States.

I'm not saying Bluedot does anything wrong with recordings. I'm saying its policy doesn't say what it does, and a policy untouched since 2023 while the product's pitch rebuilt itself around AI reads as unfinished. If botless recording is the feature you want, Fireflies lists a Chrome extension that records without the bot, and Granola's whole design is local capture. Both have policies written this year.

In-Person Meetings, The Phone Already Does This

The related search that keeps appearing is "for in-person meetings," and for that job the honest answer isn't a meeting bot at all.

Apple's user guide says the Notes app on an iPhone 12 or later records audio and transcribes it automatically when the device language is one of ten supported ones, including English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and both Chinese scripts. The transcript is searchable, you can add it to the note or copy it out, and playing the audio from a tapped word works the way the paid tools do it. Summaries need Apple Intelligence, which means an iPhone 15 Pro or an iPhone 16 or later on iOS 27.

Nothing leaves the phone for the transcription itself. There's no vendor policy to read because there's no vendor.

Two traps, both from Apple's own page. Deleting the audio recording also deletes the transcript, so if your plan was to keep the text and drop the audio to save space, add the transcript to the note body first. And phone call recording, which also lands in a Call Recordings folder in Notes, plays an audio notice that both participants hear and isn't available at all in the European Union and a list of other countries. That's the consent problem solved by design rather than left to you, which I think is the right way round even when it's inconvenient.

The notebook app Apple ships piece covers what else Notes does and where it stops. For the Android side, the same on-device question is answered in the Android notes application privacy breakdown, which reads each app's declared data collection rather than its marketing.

Pick By The Column That Bothers You

The row I'd argue with is the second one. "No training" is a policy sentence, and policy sentences get revised. Otter's was updated in June, Fireflies' in March, Granola's on 8 September, tl;dv's on 9 September. Two of the eight changed their wording in the week before I read them. Whatever you pick, put a reminder in your calendar to reread the policy in six months, because that's the real retention period of any of these promises.

Questions People Ask

Can I use AI to take meeting notes? Yes, and the interesting question is what the vendor keeps afterwards, which is the table above. The transcription quality across these tools is close enough that I wouldn't choose on it.

Can ChatGPT take meeting notes? Not in the sense the search means. It doesn't join calls or record rooms. What it does is summarise a transcript you paste in, which means you still need one of the recorders above, and then you've handed the transcript to a second company with its own retention policy. Two policies to read instead of one.

Which is the best AI meeting note taker? For a single person who cares about the audio, Granola, because the audio is gone. For a team that already pays Microsoft or Zoom, the built-in one, because it costs nothing extra and the retention is documented or the training question is answered in writing. For someone in the EU, tl;dv. There's no single answer that survives the retention column.

Which AI is best for note-taking generally? Different question from meeting capture. Note apps with transcription bundled are priced per hour of audio in the AI note taking app cost breakdown, and for one person that's usually the cheaper road.

What's the best AI note-taking device? The phone in your pocket, if it's an iPhone 12 or later, for the reasons in the in-person section. Dedicated recorder gadgets add a vendor, a cloud account and a policy you'd have to read, and I'd want a specific reason before adding all three.

Is there a free AI meeting note taker? Every tool in the table has a free tier, and they differ mostly in what they keep and for how long. tl;dv's three months and Fireflies' 400-minute bucket are the two that expire on their own. Fathom's doesn't.

What I'd Do

Decide which cell in the table you can't live with, then pick the tool that fixes that one cell. Don't try to fix all of them, because no tool does.

If I were setting this up for myself today, my concern is the audio file more than the transcript, so I'd start with Granola and switch the training toggle off on day one. If the meetings are in Teams anyway, I'd leave the transcription toggle alone and delete the file from OneDrive when I'm done with it, which is faster than any bot's deletion request.

And I'd count the meetings first. One a week doesn't justify a subscription with a policy attached. The full stack cost is where these small monthly lines end up, and a recorder is the easiest one to skip.