21 August 2026
There is no single best AI note taker for Zoom — there are three different kinds of tool, and they behave differently depending on whether the call is a Zoom call, a call on another platform, or one you host yourself. A bot that dials into a Zoom meeting works nothing like Zoom's own built-in AI Companion, and neither works like a platform where the AI is already part of the room before anyone joins. Pick based on which calls you actually need covered, not on a features list.
Search results for this lump three different mechanisms together. A bot-based assistant dials into your Zoom meeting through Zoom's own meeting SDK, sits in the waiting room until someone admits it, and then appears in the participant list for the rest of the call. Zoom's own AI Companion is different: it runs inside Zoom's infrastructure on your account, so there's no separate guest to admit, but it only works on Zoom. A third category — platforms that host the call themselves, AVAY among them — never touches Zoom at all; the AI is already in the room because the room is theirs.
Feature lists don't tell you which one fits. These four questions do.
A bot-based notetaker joins as a guest, the same way any external participant would. On a call you host, that's manageable: you admit it once, and Zoom's waiting-room and lock settings let you control who gets in after. On a call someone else hosts — a client's Zoom, a partner's Zoom — you have none of that control. The bot shows up in their meeting on your account's say-so, they see the name in the participant list, and some will ask you to remove it before the call starts. That single moment, a client asking 'what's that thing in here', is the practical reason a lot of teams drop bot-based tools for anything client-facing, even when the notes themselves are good.
Companion runs as a feature of your Zoom account rather than a separate guest, so there's no extra name in the participant list to explain. The trade-off is scope: it only works on meetings hosted within a Zoom account that has it enabled, at whatever license tier Zoom currently requires — check Zoom's own documentation for exact terms, since tiers and availability move. It does nothing for a call on Teams, Meet, or a client's own platform, and it doesn't help with the growing number of calls that happen outside Zoom entirely. Where it stores transcripts and for how long is also something to read directly from Zoom's current policy rather than take on faith.
AVAY is in this third category, and it's worth saying plainly: AVAY does not join Zoom calls. There's no bot, no dial-in, no participant to admit, because the meeting has to be held on AVAY itself for the AI to be in the room at all. That rules it out for anyone whose calls happen on Zoom by default — a sales team whose prospects send Zoom links, a consultancy whose clients pick the tool. Where it earns its place is the calls you control: internal syncs, 1:1s, anything where your team picks the platform, the AI transcribes and tracks action items live without an extra name in the tile grid, and there's nothing to admit or explain. One honest limitation on the storage axis: recordings AVAY makes are saved to the machine that hosted them rather than centralized in a cloud archive by default, which matters if your policy is built around one shared repository.
Most teams don't have one kind of call — they have a mix, and the right answer is often two tools, not one. If half your week is calls clients set up on their own Zoom, a bot-based assistant is the only option that follows you into rooms you don't own, and you accept that some clients will ask about it. If your Zoom calls are internal and hosted on your own account, Companion removes the visibility problem entirely. If you can choose the platform for your own team's meetings, a call-hosting platform takes the bot question off the table for that slice of your calendar — just not for the rest of it.
| Extra participant appears? | Who can turn it off | Covers calls on other platforms? | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bot-based assistant (dials into Zoom) | Yes, named in the participant list | Host, meeting admin, or the account that invited it | Only if invited to that specific call |
| Zoom's built-in AI Companion | No separate entry, shown in settings only | Host or the Zoom account admin | No — Zoom meetings only |
| Call-hosting platform (e.g. AVAY) | No, the AI is part of the room itself | Whoever hosts the call | No — only calls held on that platform |
Only if it's a bot-based tool — those dial in and appear in the participant list like any guest. Zoom's own AI Companion runs inside your account instead, so it never shows up as a separate name in the call.
If you're hosting, yes — Zoom's waiting room and admission settings let you decline or remove any guest, bot included. If you're a guest on someone else's call, you have no control over it; you can only ask the host to remove it or object out loud.
Within the Zoom account that generated them, under whatever retention and license terms Zoom currently sets — read Zoom's own documentation rather than assume, since account tiers and storage terms change.
Most flag explicit commitments — phrases like 'I'll send that by Friday' — reasonably well, because those follow a recognisable pattern. What they tend to miss is the implicit kind, where someone nods along to a task without saying a deadline out loud; no tool in any of the three categories catches that consistently.
No. AVAY hosts the meeting itself rather than dialing into someone else's — there's no bot to send into Zoom. To get AVAY's live notes and action-item tracking, the meeting has to be held on AVAY instead of Zoom.
The best AI note taker for Zoom isn't one product — it's whichever category matches who hosts your calls, and the honest answer for a lot of teams is two tools: a bot for calls you don't control, and something bot-free for the ones you do.
AVAY is a video meeting platform that transcribes the call itself — no bot joins, because there is nothing to join. Start one at avay.ai, read how each part works in the documentation, or see what it costs.