What is the best free AI note taking app?

Fathom, if your conversations happen on video calls. Its free plan has no cap on recordings or transcription and writes a summary after every call. On a phone, Apple Notes on an iPhone 12 or newer and Recorder on a Pixel cost nothing.

What is the best free AI note taking app for meetings?

Fathom, for Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls, because its free plan doesn't cap recordings. Granola is the free pick when you'd rather not have a bot in the call, as long as 30 days of history is enough.

Is there a free AI note taker with no limits?

Not quite. Fathom's free plan puts no cap on recordings or transcripts but keeps AI action items for paying users. Apple Notes and Pixel's Recorder list no monthly cap, but they need the right phone, and summaries need an iPhone 15 Pro or a Pixel 8 or later.

What is the best free note taking app for iPhone?

Apple Notes. It's already on your iPhone, records and transcribes on an iPhone 12 or later, and writes summaries on an iPhone 15 Pro or any iPhone 16 or later.

Yes, with limits. Otter's free Basic plan gives you 300 minutes a month, stops each conversation at 30 minutes and keeps your 25 most recent.

Do I have to tell people I'm using an AI note taker?

Yes, before you start recording. Recording laws change from country to country, and a bot-free app gives the other people no sign that it's listening.

9 best free AI note taking apps in 2026, and their limits

How we chose

Every app here does the note taking for you. It listens, writes out what was said and, on most of them, sums it up in a few lines. Each one also has a version you never pay for. We left out apps that charge for AI notes from day one, and apps whose free version is a trial with an end date.

Six questions decided the list:

How much can you record before the free version stops you: minutes, meetings or days of history?
Where does it listen: a video call, a room, or your phone?
What do you get afterwards: a transcript, a summary, answers to your questions?
Does a bot join the call, where everyone else can see it?
Which devices does it run on: iPhone, Android, Mac, Windows, the web?
What's the first thing that makes you pay?

We built the list from each maker's own pricing and help pages, read on 29 October 2026, not from hands-on testing. So you won't find accuracy scores or star ratings. Prices are in US dollars, as of October 2026.

Three kinds of free

Free means three different deals in this category, and knowing which one you're signing up for saves you a surprise in week three.

Built into your phone. Apple Notes on an iPhone and Recorder on a Pixel cost nothing, and neither Apple's nor Google's help page puts a monthly limit on recording. The catch is the phone: an older model gets a transcript but no summary.
Free forever, with a meter. Fathom, Otter, Granola, Fireflies, Tactiq and Read AI each count something, whether that's minutes, meetings, storage or how far back you can look. Fathom's meter is the loosest of the six, since its free plan holds back extras like AI action items and leaves recordings alone.
Free in name only. Krisp gives you a week, and Notta stops each conversation at 3 minutes, so neither made the list.

One app on the list doesn't record at all. Gemini Notebook works on material you already have, such as lecture slides or a transcript from one of the recorders, and answers questions about it.

The 9 best free AI note taking apps

If your conversations happen on video calls, start with Fathom. If they happen in a room, start with the recorder on your phone. Six of the nine record meetings, two come with your phone, and one helps you study what you've collected.

1. Fathom: best free plan for video calls

Fathom records your Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams call and has a summary waiting as soon as it ends. The free plan doesn't cap how many calls it records or transcribes, and you can search across all of them later. On a Mac you can skip the bot altogether, with bot-free capture in beta.

Fathom's pricing page keeps a few things for paying users. AI action items start on the cheapest paid plan for one person, at US$20 a month or US$16 a month paid yearly. The chat that answers questions about a call is limited on the free plan. Fathom's home page says it's now part of Superhuman.

Pick it if most of your conversations are video calls and you want to pay nothing for as long as you use it. Skip it if you mostly talk face to face, because Fathom is built around calls on a screen.

2. Apple Notes: best free pick on iPhone

An iPhone 12 or later already has an AI note taker in it. Open a note, choose Record Audio, and the words show up as text while you talk. Apple's guide lets you search the transcript afterwards, tap a line to hear that moment again, and drop the whole transcript into the note.

Transcription works when the phone is set to English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French, German, Japanese, Korean, or Simplified or Traditional Chinese. Summaries need more. They run on Apple Intelligence, which on iOS 27 means an iPhone 15 Pro, 15 Pro Max or any iPhone 16 or later. Record a call in the Phone or FaceTime app and its transcript lands in Notes too.

Pick it if you own a recent iPhone and want AI notes without signing up for anything. Skip it if you want summaries on an iPhone older than the 15 Pro, or if you carry an Android phone.

3. Recorder: best free pick on a Pixel

Google's Recorder app comes on Pixel phones from the Pixel 3 on, and on the Pixel Tablet. It writes out speech as you record, keeps going with the screen off, and holds up to 18 hours in one recording. Google's help page says you can search a recording for a word, a phrase or even a sound like applause, and jump straight to it.

On a Pixel 8 or later, Recorder also summarizes recordings of 5 minutes to an hour of speech, in English, Mandarin, Hindi, Italian, French, German or Japanese, and Google makes those summaries in its cloud. To keep recordings on the phone, you can use Recorder without a Google Account.

Pick it if you carry a Pixel. It's the nearest thing Android has to the recorder in Apple Notes. Skip it if your phone isn't a Pixel: Google's page lists Pixel phones and the Pixel Tablet.

4. Otter: best free pick for short talks in a room

Otter shows the transcript while people are still talking and labels who said what. It runs on iPhone and Android as well as Zoom, Teams and Google Meet. Put your phone on the desk at a club meeting and you can scroll back to the sentence you missed while the speaker carries on.

The free Basic plan gives you 300 minutes a month. Each conversation stops transcribing at 30 minutes, and Otter keeps only your 25 most recent. You also get three file imports for the life of the account, and an AI chat that answers questions across your meetings. Pro raises the limits to 90 minutes a meeting and 1,200 minutes a month, for US$16.99 a month or US$8.33 a month paid yearly.

Pick it if your talks are short and the speaker is in the room with you. Skip it for hour-long lectures unless you'll pay, because a free transcript ends at the 30-minute mark.

5. Granola: best free pick with no bot in the call

Granola listens through your own computer's or phone's audio, so nothing new appears in the participant list. It turns what it hears into meeting notes, in a template you can change, and runs on desktop, iPhone, Android and Apple Watch.

The free Basic plan keeps the note taking and limits how far back you can look: 30 days of meeting history. Business, at US$14 a user a month, keeps all of it and connects to apps such as Notion and HubSpot.

Pick it if you meet people you don't know well and would rather not explain a bot. Skip it if you need notes from more than a month ago and won't pay.

6. Gemini Notebook: best free pick for studying

Gemini Notebook is Google's research notebook, and the old notebooklm.google address now opens it. It doesn't record anything. You feed it material instead: lecture slides, PDFs, a transcript from Apple Notes or Otter, your own notes. Then you ask questions. Google's help page says it answers only from those sources and gives no answer when they don't cover it.

Its Studio panel turns a notebook into a study guide, flashcards, a quiz, a mind map or an Audio Overview you can listen to. The free plan, which you sign up for with a Gmail account, allows 100 notebooks with up to 50 sources each, and a single source can run to 500,000 words. Higher limits come with Google's AI plans.

Pick it if you're revising for an exam or working through a stack of reading for a project. Skip it if you need something to record with, or pair it with one of the recorders above.

7. Fireflies: best free pick for other languages

Fireflies transcribes in more than 100 languages and joins Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and other call apps. Its Chrome extension records without the Fireflies bot, and there are apps for Android, iPhone and desktop.

The free plan transcribes your meetings but rations the AI summaries, and storage stops at 400 minutes across your team. A single recording tops out at two hours. Pro gives each person 8,000 minutes of storage and unlimited summaries for US$18 a month, or US$10 a month paid yearly.

Pick it if your family calls or your study group switch between languages. Skip it if you want a long archive for free, since 400 minutes fills up within a few busy weeks.

8. Tactiq: best free pick for calls in Chrome

Tactiq lives in Chrome as an extension, so there's nothing else to install, and it transcribes your Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams calls. You can share or export a transcript and ask its AI about the meeting.

Free gets you 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month. Pro, at US$8 a month paid yearly, makes transcripts unlimited and lets you turn off Tactiq's transcript notification. Teachers and students can apply for an education plan.

Pick it if you have a few calls a month in Chrome, like a weekly club call. Skip it if you meet more often than that: the eleventh call of the month gets no transcript.

9. Read AI: best free pick for a handful of meetings

On Read AI's free plan, five meetings a month get a transcript, a summary and search, and you get its personalized meeting coach too. It has apps for Windows, Mac, Android and iPhone, and works in more than 20 languages.

Pro removes the meeting cap. It costs US$15 a month if you pay for the year, or US$19.75 if you'd rather go month to month and stop whenever you like.

Pick it if you have one meeting a week, say a volunteer committee or a parents' group. Skip it if you meet every day, since five a month is gone in the first week.

What each free plan runs out of

Fathom is the only meeting app here whose free recordings never run out. Prices are each maker's cheapest monthly rate on 29 October 2026, and most of them need a year paid up front.

App	Free limit	Paid from
Fathom	No cap on recordings	US$16 a month
Apple Notes	iPhone 12 or newer	Free
Recorder	Pixel phones	Free
Otter	300 minutes, 30 per talk	US$8.33 a month
Granola	30 days of history	US$14 a month
Gemini Notebook	50 sources a notebook	Google's AI plans
Fireflies	400 minutes stored	US$10 a month
Tactiq	10 transcripts a month	US$8 a month
Read AI	5 meetings a month	US$15 a month

Count your week before you choose. Say you have eight video calls a week. Read AI's five meetings are gone in the first week and Tactiq's ten in the second, while Fathom never runs out. Lectures change the sum: an hour-long lecture needs two separate Otter recordings, so a phone's own recorder serves you better.

Free plans that are really trials

Two names turn up on most lists of free AI note takers. Neither will see you through a month without paying.

Krisp. Its free option is a 7-day trial of the paid features, no card needed. Krisp's pricing page puts the Core plan at US$8 a month paid yearly once the week is up.
Notta. The free plan gives 120 minutes a month, but each conversation stops at 3 minutes, and you get 10 AI summaries a month. Notta's pricing page lists Pro at US$8.17 a month, billed as US$97.99 for the year.

A 7-day clock or a 3-minute cap rules both out when the budget is zero. Willing to pay? Our best AI note taking apps list puts Granola's and Fathom's paid plans beside Notion, Evernote and Mem.

Which one fits your week

Start from where your conversations happen.

Video calls, as many as you like, on a budget of zero: Fathom.
Calls with people you'd rather not show a bot: Granola, if 30 days of history is enough.
Lectures and meetings in a room: Apple Notes on an iPhone 12 or newer, Recorder on a Pixel, and Otter on any other phone for talks under 30 minutes.
Revising for an exam: record lectures with one of those, then load the transcripts and your reading into Gemini Notebook and ask it for a quiz.
Calls in a language other than English: Fireflies.
A few calls a month in Chrome: Tactiq. One meeting a week: Read AI.

Setting up the rest of your phone? Start with our picks of the best productivity iPhone apps or the best productivity apps for Android. A summary's to-do items only help once they're on the list you check every morning, so copy each one into your task app with a date beside it before you close the notes. Still choosing where the notes themselves will live? Read Obsidian vs Notion.

Most of what you write down never happens in a meeting. In ActivityTracker you talk a note in and it turns into text, and one search looks through every note.

See how notes work

Before you record anyone

Tell people first. A free app doesn't change that, and the rules on recording people differ from country to country. Say it out loud before you start: "I'm recording this so I can take notes, is that all right?"

Then use what the apps give you:

Know who can see what. A bot that joins the call sits in the participant list for everyone to see, while bot-free capture through Granola, Fireflies' Chrome extension or Fathom's Mac beta shows up nowhere. Nobody knows about those unless you tell them.
Turn on Granola's notice. Its free plan has a setting that tells people you're using it.
Before you share a summary with anyone, read it against what you heard, and fix any name, number or date the transcript got wrong.
Delete what you don't need. In Apple Notes the transcript goes when you delete its recording, and on a Pixel a deleted recording is gone from every synced device and from recorder.google.com.
Check what trains the AI. Granola lets free users opt out of model training at any time, and Google says Gemini Notebook doesn't use your data for training unless you send feedback.

Noor's week on free plans

Made-up example: Noor is in her second year of an accounting degree and sells cakes at a Saturday market. She has an iPhone 13 and a Windows laptop, and a budget of nothing.

On Monday she has two 50-minute lectures. Otter's free plan would stop at 30 minutes, so she records both in Apple Notes. Her phone is too old for summaries, but that evening she searches the transcript for "accruals" and finds the worked answer in a few seconds.

On Tuesday her project group meets on Google Meet. She tells the group, lets Fathom's free bot in, and the summary is waiting when the call ends.

On Wednesday she adds both transcripts and the week's slides to a Gemini Notebook and asks for a 20-question quiz. The four she gets wrong send her back to two slides.

On Thursday her flour supplier wants a video call about a bulk order. She uses Granola, so no bot appears, and copies the delivery date into her task list.

By Saturday she has spent nothing. Notes handles lectures, Fathom the group and Gemini Notebook the revision. After exams she'll decide whether 30 days of Granola history is enough for the cake stall.