AI note takers in Australia: Fathom vs Granola vs Otter.

What is the best AI note taker for an Australian business?

For most small businesses, Fathom is the best AI note taker to start with: its free plan records and summarises unlimited calls. Granola suits people who hate a bot joining the meeting. Otter suits teams that record a lot of in-person conversations. If your office already pays for Microsoft 365 Copilot, try its Teams recaps before buying anything.

All of them do the same basic job. They listen to a meeting, write a transcript, and turn it into a summary with action items. The differences are in how they listen, what they keep, what they cost per person, and how easily the notes get to wherever the work happens next.

We record our own sales calls in Fathom and used Granola before that, so this comes from daily use, not a feature list. We also set these tools up for clients in our AI training sessions, which is where most of the lessons below came from.

How much do Fathom, Granola and Otter cost?

Fathom, Granola and Otter all have a free plan. Paid plans run from about US$8 to US$35 a person a month, depending on the tool and whether you pay yearly. Fathom, Granola, Otter and Fireflies bill in US dollars, so the Australian cost moves with the exchange rate. Microsoft shows Copilot in Australian dollars.

Prices below come from each vendor's official pricing page, checked today: Fathom, Granola, Otter, Fireflies and Microsoft.

Watch the free plan limits, because they decide whether you ever need to pay. Otter's free plan cuts off at 30 minutes per conversation, which ends most client meetings early. Granola's free plan keeps only 30 days of history. Fathom's free plan is the most generous of the three for a business owner who just wants every call written up.

Fathom vs Granola vs Otter: what is the real difference?

The biggest difference is how they listen. Granola records from your own computer, so no bot joins the call. Fathom offers a bot or, in beta, a bot-free option. Otter and Fireflies usually join your Zoom, Teams or Google Meet call as a visible bot participant.

• Fathom is the easiest start. Free unlimited recordings, good summaries, and on the Business plan it writes call notes straight into your CRM. It connects to Claude and ChatGPT, and has an API, so the notes can feed other tools.
• Granola feels like a notepad. You type a few rough notes during the meeting, and it fills them out from the audio afterwards. No bot, and Granola says it deletes the audio once the transcript is done.
• Otter has iPhone and Android apps for in-person meetings, and on the paid plans takes imported recordings and long sessions (up to four hours on Business). It is also the one Australians search for most, by a wide margin.
• Fireflies is close to Otter in what it does, with a mobile app for in-person recording and a lot of integrations. Worth a look if your team already uses it.
• Copilot in Teams makes sense if every meeting is already in Teams and you already pay for Copilot. Adding a second note taker on top of that is usually two tools doing one job.

One honest limit across all of them: transcription gets product names and jargon wrong. Our own Fathom summaries regularly turn "Claude Code" into "Chord Code" and "ServiceM8" into "ServiceMate". The summary is right about what was decided. Check names, numbers and prices against the transcript before they go anywhere official.

Is it legal to record a meeting in Australia?

It depends on the state, and the rules differ more than most people expect. Some states require consent from everyone in the conversation, others allow a participant to record with limits on what they do with it. The safe habit everywhere is simple: tell people at the start that the call is recorded and get a clear yes.

Western Australia and New South Wales are generally on the stricter side. If your clients are spread across states, or a call has people in more than one, do not try to work out which law applies on the fly. Make consent part of how every meeting starts.

• Put "this call is recorded for notes" in the calendar invite.
• Say it out loud in the first minute, and stop recording if anyone objects.
• Turn off auto-join for calls you should not record, like HR, legal or personal matters.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you record calls with customers as a matter of course, or work in a regulated field, check with a lawyer.

Where does your meeting data go?

Into the vendor's cloud. Every tool here stores transcripts on its own servers, and the controls over training, retention and deletion vary by plan. Before you switch one on, check whether it trains on your data, how long it keeps recordings, and whether you can delete them across the whole team.

A few things we check with every client:

• Training. Granola offers a model training opt-out on every plan, set per user on the cheaper plans and for the whole workspace on Enterprise. Look for the same setting in whichever tool you pick, and switch it on.
• Retention. Granola deletes audio after transcription. Fathom's Enterprise plan adds custom data retention. On Otter's free plan you only see your 25 most recent conversations.
• Who can see what. Team plans let staff share and search each other's calls. That is useful for sales, and a problem if the board meeting ends up in a shared folder.
• Regulated data. Fathom and Granola both mention HIPAA support on certain plans, and Otter offers it as an Enterprise add-on. That is a US health standard, not an Australian one, but it tells you the tool has thought about sensitive data.

For health, legal, financial advice or NDIS conversations, decide where that data is allowed to go before you pick a tool. How we handle client data on our own builds and workshops is on our security page.

What should happen to the notes after the meeting?

The summary is only the first step. The time saving comes from feeding the transcript into the next piece of work: a proposal, a scope, a client file, a CRM update or a follow-up email. Most businesses stop at the summary and wonder why the tool did not change much.

The pattern that works: the note taker produces the transcript, an AI assistant like Claude turns it into a first draft of the real document using your templates and past examples, and a person checks it. If you set the templates up once inside a project, every new transcript drops straight in. Our guide to using Claude Projects as a business brain shows how to set that up.

The same shape works for most service businesses. A five-person creative agency in Sydney we spoke with this month was already turning client call transcripts into scopes of work with AI. A consultant can do the same with site visit notes, and a builder with a client walkthrough. When the documents coming out the other end are long or follow a strict format, that becomes a document processing job, which is where a proper build beats copying and pasting.

When is an AI note taker the wrong tool?

When the problem is not meetings. If you are losing work because nobody answers the phone, a note taker does nothing for you. If your team rarely meets clients, the summaries will sit unread. And if everything already runs through Teams with Copilot, a second tool adds cost and confusion.

Missed calls are a different problem with a different fix, covered in our guide to AI receptionists in Australia. A note taker also does not replace judgement: it records what was said, not whether the quote you agreed to on the call was a good idea.