Fathom

What it is

Fathom is a meeting bot that joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls, records and transcribes them, and generates AI summaries with action items and follow-up emails. It’s known for the most generous free tier in the category: unlimited recording, transcription, and storage, with AI summaries limited only after five meetings a month.

Our verdict

The easy default if you want to try automated notes without paying. Unlimited recording and storage on the free plan is rare, and the summaries are clean and fast — usually ready before you’ve left the call. The “Ask Fathom” chat lets you interrogate a call after the fact, and the auto-drafted follow-up email is a genuine time saver for PMs who owe a recap after every customer conversation.

Where it falls short: the free tier’s five-AI-summaries-a-month cap is the catch — you get the recordings, but the summaries you actually want dry up quickly, so regular users land on Premium. And the visible bot joining the call makes it a poor fit for sensitive discovery.

Get value in 10 minutes

1. Sign up and connect your calendar; Fathom will auto-join upcoming Zoom/Meet/Teams calls.
2. Join your next call — Fathom appears as a participant and records automatically.
3. During the call, click Highlight on any moment you’ll want later (a customer pain point, a commitment).
4. After the call, open the summary and select the “Action items” section — reassign owners if it guessed wrong.
5. Hit the auto-generated follow-up email, edit the two lines that need a human, and send your recap.