What is AI meeting transcription and which platform is best?

AI meeting transcription uses speech-to-text and large language models to turn spoken meetings into searchable transcripts, summaries and action items in real time or shortly after the call ends. The choice of platform matters because data residency, consent and integration with your existing video conferencing platform all differ between native and third-party tools.

Most enterprise video conferencing platforms now ship transcription natively, and several third-party tools join meetings as a "ghost participant" via the Recall.ai API to do the same job platform-agnostically.

For UK organisations in regulated sectors (legal, financial services, healthcare) the native tools are usually the safer default because the audio and transcripts stay inside the same Microsoft, Google or Cisco tenant the rest of your data lives in, and consent is governed by your existing platform policies. Third-party "ghost participant" tools record on behalf of one user and that creates consent-notification issues when the other attendees haven't agreed to the third-party processor.

If your room hardware is certified Microsoft Teams Rooms or Zoom Rooms, the native AI transcription will work out of the box. A video conferencing deployment plan should specify which AI tools are sanctioned at the policy level so users aren't bringing in their own. For Microsoft estates the AI capability is part of the Teams Premium licence and ties cleanly into a Microsoft Teams Rooms buildout.

Quick reference: native (Teams Copilot, Zoom AI Companion, Webex AI Assistant, Gemini) for compliance-led estates; third-party (Otter, Fireflies, Read.ai) for cross-platform flexibility.