AI meeting notes for a small Texas team: Otter, Fireflies, or just your phone

You walk out of a 45-minute customer meeting with a napkin of scribbles and a memory that is already fading. The next morning you are reconstructing what was agreed, who owes what, and which number they quoted. An AI note taker solves this directly: it records the meeting and hands you a written transcript, usually with a summary, so nothing depends on your memory or your pen.

What the tools do

Otter and Fireflies both record meetings, transcribe the audio, and produce summaries. Otter works with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, and can also transcribe audio or video files you import. Fireflies joins or ingests calls the same way and adds unlimited transcription and AI summaries on every plan, including its free one.

What Otter costs

Otter has a permanent free plan, not a trial. The free plan includes 300 transcription minutes a month, a 30-minute limit per conversation, the 25 most recent conversations, 3 lifetime audio or video file imports, and 20 AI Chat questions a month. That 30-minute per-conversation cap is the first wall most owners hit, because a lot of working meetings run longer than half an hour.

Otter Pro is $16.99 per user per month billed monthly, or $8.33 per user per month billed annually, at $99.96 a year. Pro lifts you to 1,200 minutes a month, 90 minutes per meeting, 10 file imports a month, and up to 5 billed users. Otter Business is $30 per user monthly or $19.99 per user annually, with unlimited meetings, a 4-hour cap per meeting, and up to 25 billed users. Enterprise is a custom quote. Otter does not refund mid-cycle, so cancel at least 24 hours before your renewal date.

What Fireflies costs

Fireflies bills per seat, and every admin or member added to the workspace counts as a seat. The free plan is $0 and includes unlimited transcription, unlimited AI summaries, and 400 minutes of meeting storage per team, with a 2-hour recording limit per meeting. Pro is $10 per seat per month billed annually or $18 billed monthly, with 8,000 minutes of storage per seat and video recording included. Business is $19 per seat annually or $29 monthly, and Enterprise is $39 per seat, annual billing only.

Fireflies also sells AI credits as an add-on. Unused purchased credits do not carry over to the next billing cycle. Upgrading takes effect immediately and you are billed the prorated difference for the rest of your cycle. Downgrades take effect at the next cycle, and only the Billing Admin can change plans. Removing a teammate lowers your seat count going forward but does not refund the current cycle.

Who paid plans are for, and who they are not for

A paid plan earns its fee when meetings are long, frequent, or client-facing. If your week has several hour-plus sessions, the 90-minute Pro cap on Otter or the 2-hour free cap on Fireflies matters. If a whole team needs to search past conversations and share notes across seats, per-seat billing is the price of doing that, and Fireflies' unlimited transcription avoids the minute math entirely.

If you take two or three short meetings a week, a free plan or a plain phone recording is enough. A voice recorder app on the phone in your pocket captures the audio, and you can hand that file to a chat tool such as ChatGPT or Claude afterward with a simple instruction: summarize this meeting, list the decisions, and list what each person agreed to do. The free Otter plan even covers 3 imported files for life, which is one way to test that workflow without paying anything. The specific limits of the built-in recording apps on iPhone and Android are not stated by any source here, so treat those as a recorder, not a transcription service, and do not assume caps or features you have not checked.

Recording law, said plainly

Recording a conversation raises a consent question before any tool question. Consent rules govern whether you can record a call or an in-person meeting, and the consequences of getting it wrong are legal, not technical. No source in this article states the current Texas statute or its exact terms, so we will not recite a rule we cannot cite. Before you record any customer or employee conversation, check the current Texas law yourself or ask a Texas attorney, and when in doubt, say out loud at the start of the meeting that you are recording and get a yes.

How to pick one option today

When transcription is overkill

Not every meeting needs a transcript. A 10-minute standup, a quick price question, or a call where you already send a written recap produces a document nobody will open. Recording everything also creates files you have to store and think about. The pattern that works for most small teams is to transcribe the meetings where details carry money or obligations, such as quotes, scopes, and client instructions, and to let the short internal chatter stay unrecorded.

Accuracy, honestly stated

Every tool claims it handles accents and jargon well. No independent source here tests how Otter or Fireflies performs on Texas accents or trade-specific vocabulary, so we state no accuracy claim in either direction. The honest check is the test in step six above: run one real meeting through the tool and read the transcript where names, numbers and trade terms appear. That tells you more than any marketing page can.

If you want a hand with the setup

Choosing the tool is the easy half. The harder half is turning transcripts into routines your whole team follows, such as recaps sent the same day and action items tracked to done. That is the kind of practical AI help Texas AI Lab works on with owner-led Texas businesses. The free AI Starter Prompt Pack has ten prompts you can use today, including versions for home services, accountants and insurance agents, and a 25-minute fit call on Zoom looks at two tasks that repeat in your week and picks a first result worth having. Replies come within one business day.