A meeting summary is a condensed account of what happened in a meeting — typically the decisions made, the actions somebody owes, and the questions nobody answered — produced from the full transcript rather than written from memory afterward. It's shorter than the conversation it describes by design; the point of writing one at all is to give a reader something they can take in in under a minute, instead of the whole recording.
What goes into one
A useful summary answers three questions specifically: what did the group decide, what did somebody commit to doing next, and what got raised but not resolved. Coii AudioNotes builds its version of this from two inputs at once — the transcript itself, plus any notes typed during or after the call — using a language model bundled with the app, so the summary reflects what was actually said rather than only what got typed down in the moment.
How it differs from a transcript, and from minutes
A transcript is the literal record: every line, attributed to whoever said it, timestamped into the recording. A summary is the transcript compressed into prose. "Minutes" sits closer to a summary than to a transcript but carries a more formal connotation — traditionally a record kept for governance purposes, sometimes reviewed and approved by the people in the meeting. Transcript vs minutes covers that distinction in full; this page is about the shorter of the two documents, whichever name a given app puts on it.
Why a good one stays checkable
The risk in any condensation is that it quietly gets something wrong — attributes a decision to the wrong person, or states as settled something that was actually left open. A summary generated from a transcript that also exists and sits alongside it isn't the only record of the meeting: anything it claims can be checked against the actual lines it was drawn from, which is a different situation from a summary that's the only thing anyone kept. What an AI notetaker does with a recording more broadly covers where this step sits in the larger process, and how speakers get told apart in the first place is what makes it possible to attribute a decision to the right name at all.
What it can't know
A summary only has the recording and whatever notes accompanied it to work from. It can't infer a commitment nobody actually voiced, and it can't account for context that lived outside the call — a decision made over email the week before, or an understanding two people already shared coming in. Reading a summary as the complete record of everything that mattered about a meeting, rather than as a compressed account of what was said inside it, is the mistake worth avoiding.
Where it sits against a tool that puts a bot in the call
Bot-based notetakers like Otter produce a comparable summary from the individual audio feeds a bot gets by joining the meeting directly; Coii AudioNotes produces the same kind of output from the Mac's own microphone and system audio instead, without anything logging into the call to get it. Coii AudioNotes against Otter covers the fuller difference between the two approaches — the summary itself, once written, looks much the same either way.
When a shorter document isn't enough
Some meetings need more than a compressed account — a board meeting that requires literal minutes for governance, or a legal conversation where the exact wording matters more than the gist. For those, the transcript is the document to keep and reference directly rather than relying on the summary alone; the summary stays useful as an index into it, a way to find the relevant minute quickly, not as a replacement for it.