Zoom's notes stop at the edge of Zoom.

Nobody should replace Zoom's meeting AI with anything if all of their meetings are Zoom meetings, they are always the host, and the seat is already paid for. It is built into the product, it costs nothing extra on an eligible paid plan, and nothing joins the call to make it work. Coii AudioNotes is worth $19 when that sentence stops describing your week: when the interview is on Meet, when the important conversation happened across a table, when you were a guest rather than the organiser, or when a recording is the kind of thing you would rather did not sit in a company account at all.

What Zoom actually offers, and what it is called this month

Worth getting the name straight first, because the search term and the product have drifted apart. Zoom's post of 24 June 2026, Meet ZoomMate, says that meeting summaries, smart compose, transcription, call summaries and voicemail prioritisation — all the capabilities that used to carry the AI Companion name — are still built right into Zoom Workplace, and that eligible paid Zoom Workplace plans continue to include core AI features at no additional cost. ZoomMate is described in the same post as a new agentic product that builds on Custom AI Companion and acts on meeting context to complete work automatically, and as a new add-on product.

So the meeting write-up you are comparing against has not gone anywhere. Zoom's Workplace Pro page still puts it plainly: AI Companion is your personal AI assistant, built into Meetings, Chats, Docs and more, and is included at no additional cost.

On how it starts, Zoom's Getting started with Zoom AI features article says that during a live meeting the host can enable Meeting summary to create a summary of the meeting from the time it is enabled, and that the summary is automatically shared with the host and can be shared with other participants by email and through Zoom Chat. Administrators can enable or disable the feature at account, group or user level from the web portal.

Two clauses in there do a lot of work, and they are the reason this page exists: the host, and from the time it is enabled.

Side by side

Four of those rows go to Zoom outright and one of them — platforms — is not close. If your colleagues are on Windows, or the summary needs to reach eleven people ten minutes after the call, stop here. This app has no answer.

Where Zoom is straightforwardly better

It is in the meeting already. No second application, no permission dialog, no remembering to press anything before you join. Software you do not have to think about beats software you do, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.

Nothing joins the call. This matters because half the category works the other way. Zoom's write-up is part of Zoom, so there is no extra participant in the list and no moment where a client asks what that account is. That is a real difference against tools like Otter and Fireflies, and it is not a difference against Coii AudioNotes, which also never appears in a meeting.

It costs nothing on top. For an organisation already paying for Zoom, the marginal price of the meeting AI is zero, and no procurement conversation is required to start using it. Twelve months of a $19 purchase is $19, but twelve months of a feature you already pay for is also, in the way finance sees it, nothing at all.

Zoom publishes its position on training. The data governance section of Zoom's AI documentation states that Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments or other communications-like customer content to train Zoom's or its third-party artificial intelligence models, and says its third-party AI providers have zero data retention policies under which they do not retain customer content, with limited exceptions for trust and safety. It also says Zoom processes and stores data based on the hosted data centre region and the applicable settings of the host, owner or user. That is a clearer commitment than several tools in this library manage, and a comparison that skipped it would not be worth reading.

It goes further than meetings. Chat composition, phone call summaries, voicemail prioritisation. Coii AudioNotes writes up recordings and does nothing else.

The meetings Zoom cannot see

Here is the part the feature comparison misses, because it is not a feature.

Count the conversations in an ordinary fortnight that you would want written up. A candidate interview on Google Meet because that is what their side uses. A client review in Teams because that is what their IT department standardised on. A supplier call on the phone, on speaker, because they never sent a link. Two people across a table in a café. A conference session you were allowed to record. A rehearsal of the thing you are presenting on Thursday.

Zoom's write-up covers none of those, and it is not a criticism of Zoom that it does not — it is a meeting product doing its own meetings. But it means the coverage you actually get is not "my meetings" but "my meetings that happened to be on this platform, when I was the host, after somebody switched it on."

Coii AudioNotes starts from the other end. It records what your Mac can already hear, as two separate tracks — your microphone, and the system audio — so the application the call arrived in is irrelevant to it. Meet, Teams, a browser tab, a phone on speaker beside the keyboard, or nothing at all because everyone is in the room.

The practical effect is one folder rather than several. A fortnight of conversations recorded this way ends up as one set of files with one naming scheme, whatever application each conversation arrived in — rather than some of them in a Zoom account, some in whichever tenant the client's IT department runs, and nothing at all for the phone calls and the two people across a table. Searching a quarter of work is then a matter of searching a directory on your own disk, and archiving it is a matter of copying that directory somewhere else. Neither of those depends on a plan still being paid for, on an administrator still having enabled something, or on an export tool still existing in the shape it had the last time you needed it.

There is one thing it cannot do, and it is the mirror image. Coii AudioNotes cannot record a meeting you are not in, because it has nothing to join with. If what you need is notes from calls you skipped, this is the wrong category entirely and a hosted notetaker is the right one.

From the time it is enabled

The second clause. Zoom's own documentation says the summary is created from the time Meeting summary is enabled, and that it is the host who enables it during the meeting.

In practice that means the first eight minutes — the part where somebody explains what changed since last time, which is very often the part you needed — are in the summary only if the host remembered before the call rather than during it. And if you are the guest, it was never your decision. You can ask. You cannot switch it on, and if your organisation's administrator has disabled it at account level, neither can the host.

Coii AudioNotes has a different failure mode, and it is worth naming rather than hiding: you have to remember to press record yourself, in an app that is not the one the meeting is in. Nobody else can do it for you and nobody else can stop you. Whether that trade is worth making depends entirely on how often you are the host.

What is ours, applied to this one

Nothing is uploaded. Zoom's position on training is good and it is not the same claim. Zoom's answer is that your content is processed in its data centres and not used for training; ours is that there is nowhere for it to be processed except the machine it was recorded on. The audio, the transcript and the minutes are files on your disk. There is no account, no sync and no sharing link, so there is no setting that governs where a recording ends up. Coii AudioNotes claims no compliance certification — not HIPAA, not SOC 2, not ISO 27001 — and it never will; what it can tell whoever asks is that sentence about the files.

Two tracks, and a name against each turn. The recording is not one mixed file. Your microphone and whatever your Mac is playing are captured separately, which matters most in the hybrid case: four people around one laptop in a room, and three more on the link. The people in the room arrive on the microphone track, the people on the call arrive on the system track, and Coii AudioNotes tells the voices apart by voice print rather than by which endpoint they connected from. The transcript comes back attributed — this person said this, that person answered that — rather than as a single column somebody has to reconstruct from memory afterwards. A week later, when a decision is queried, the useful question is almost never what was said. It is who agreed to it.

It works with the network off, including the minutes. This one needs an honest caveat: if the network is down, the Zoom meeting is not happening either, so a plane is not really the example. The example is the in-person ones. A site visit with no usable signal. A committee meeting in a basement room. An interview in someone's workshop. The transcription runs on your Mac segment by segment while the conversation is still going, and the summary is written by a language model bundled inside the application, so a recording made underground is fully written up before you get back to a signal.

$19, once, on three of your own Macs. Against Zoom this is a strange argument and it should be made carefully, because the meeting AI is not what you are paying Zoom for. The honest version: the write-up is free as long as the seat continues, and the seat continues at somebody's monthly cost, and the notes stay with the account rather than with you. A one-time $19 buys a different thing — not a cheaper subscription, but no subscription, and an archive that is yours in the plain sense of being files. The pricing page is a single line for that reason.

What switching actually costs

It is not a switch. Zoom stays installed; you still take Zoom calls. The change is which application is recording during them, and for a great many people the answer is both, for a while.

Nothing comes across. Existing Zoom summaries and recordings live in your Zoom account and are yours to export from there under Zoom's own terms. Coii AudioNotes has no importer and will not pull them over. A page promising otherwise would be selling a feature that does not exist.

Two things stop being automatic. Sharing the summary with the room, and the summary appearing without anybody doing anything. If your team relies on either, losing them is a real cost and you should price it before buying.

Thirty days settles it. No card, no account, every feature. Take it through a fortnight of the meetings you actually have — including the ones that are not on Zoom, because those are the ones this is for.

When the host is not you

Consultants, contractors, freelancers, recruiters, journalists and anyone who sells into other companies spend most of their week inside somebody else's meeting infrastructure. The link arrives; you click it; you are a guest in an account you do not control, on whichever platform they chose.

That is the situation Coii AudioNotes is shaped for, and it is worth being concrete about what it changes. Your own recording of a call does not depend on the client having enabled anything. It does not vanish when the engagement ends and their account stops including you. It is not in a format that requires their plan to read. And it is consistent across clients, so the meeting with the company on Zoom and the meeting with the company on Teams produce the same kind of record in the same folder.

What it does not change: whether you may record at all. Consent rules differ by jurisdiction, one-party and all-party consent are separate regimes rather than degrees of one, and nothing here is advice about a particular call. Ask somebody qualified, and ask the room. Both are cheaper than the alternative.

Who should pick which

Stay with Zoom's own write-up if your meetings are on Zoom; if you are usually the host or your host is reliable; if the summary needs to reach everyone who was there without anybody exporting anything; if your colleagues are on Windows; or if your organisation has already decided where meeting content is allowed to sit and the answer is Zoom.

Buy Coii AudioNotes if a real share of your important conversations are on another platform, on a phone, or in a room; if you are usually a guest rather than an organiser; if you want both audio tracks and speaker attribution rather than a shared paragraph; or if the recordings are the sort that should stay on the machine that made them.

Most weeks, the answer is both, with the paid app taking the meetings the seat cannot see. If you are shortlisting more broadly, the other hosted tools worth comparing are in the library — Granola and tl;dv most often — and Apple Notes is where to start if you want to spend nothing at all. The thirty days need no card and no account.