How To Take Meeting Notes in Teams More Effectively?

Taking meeting notes in team meetings while trying to focus on other meeting participants could be challenging. It is not just easily become an overwhelming task, but also impacts your productivity. On average, we lose around 31 hours each month to unproductive meetings. However, with the advance of technology and virtual meetings, you can regain control over your Teams meetings.

In this guide, I will show you how to take effective meeting notes in Microsoft Teams, saving you time to focus on the participants and not the meeting notes.

Why meeting notes are important?

Meeting notes are crucial for several reasons:

Reference point

Meeting notes are a handy reference for recalling what was discussed during a meeting. People tend to forget the agenda and the details discussed a few months back, even if it is crucial information.

This is when you can take advantage of organized, structured, easily searchable, and automated meeting notes.

Accountability

The meeting notes describe what was discussed during a meeting and assign tasks and action items to teams or team members, making it clear who is responsible for what after the meeting. This helps ensure that commitments made during the meeting will be fulfilled in the future.

Communication

In most cases, not everyone involved in the topic can join the meeting. Tools can help the meeting organizer share notes, highlights, video clips, and more with people who could not join the call so everyone will be on the same page later.

Two alternatives to take meeting notes in Microsoft teams

You have two options to take meeting notes when using Teams:

1. You can use Microsoft Teams’s built-in meeting notes functions.
2. Alternatively, you can utilize third-party AI apps to automate your meeting notes.

How to take meeting notes with Microsoft Teams’s built-in meeting notes?

You can either use the good old fashioned manual note taking or you can transcribe your Teams meetings.

Manual note-taking in Microsoft Teams meetings

Although I am not a big fan of manual note-taking, I totally understand if it feels more comfortable than using automated meeting notes. You can easily access the meeting notes in teams during meetings. Just follow these steps.

1. Start or join your Teams meeting.
2. Click on “Notes,” which you can typically find after selecting “More” or the three-dotted menu.
3. You can now view the notes and make real-time edits or additions as needed.

Microsoft’s built-in collaborative notes are simple and easily accessible to other meeting participants as well. This feature is powered by Microsoft Loop (Loop Component), and you can add collaborative notes and follow-up tasks to your meeting notes.

Later on, you can find your follow-up tasks assigned to you in the Planner, which can be used in the Microsoft Tasks app (Microsoft To Do).

Automated meeting notes in Teams meetings

If you are using Microsoft Teams meetings, you can also get access to automated meeting notes. Microsoft Teams has an AI-powered transcription tool that can convert speech to text.

Accessing the transcription function during your Microsoft Teams meetings is straightforward if it is allowed by your IT admin. Here are the steps:

1. Start or join your Teams meeting.
2. Click on the three-dotted menu and select “Record and transcribe”.
3. Hit “Start transcription”.
4. You can see the live meeting transcription in action.

Once the meeting ends, you can download the meeting transcription and agenda or search for the key points using the meeting recap feature.

Limitations Of Microsoft Teams Meeting Notes

Microsoft Teams meeting notes have three significant drawbacks compared to AI note-taking apps.

Works only with Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams’s built-in feature works only with Teams. Streamlining all your online meeting notes is a hassle if you use other video conferencing platforms besides Microsoft Team.

Keeping your meeting notes organized and consistent can become time-consuming and confusing with different platforms in the mix.

Feature set

Microsoft Teams has some simple but valuable features to enhance meeting productivity. However, these features are pretty limited compared to AI-powered tools.

For example, AI note-taking apps generally have a wide range of team collaboration features where you can do more than add action items, agendas, email notifications, or tasks.

Integration limitations

Simply put, third-party AI tools offer a wider range of integration options with various applications. When you are not exclusively using Microsoft products, sharing meeting notes and an agenda or assigning tasks will be more complicated.

Using AI apps for better meeting notes

The other alternative is to utilize AI tools to take care of your meeting notes.

Such apps use natural language processing, speaker recognition, and machine learning to make note-taking more efficient, accurate, and organized. Besides note-taking, these tools offer many features to make your meetings more productive.

AI meeting apps seamlessly integrate with many meeting platforms, most supporting multiple languages. So, regardless of which platform you use or the languages spoken in your meetings, these AI tools ensure you are covered for effective note-taking and much more.

How AI meeting apps can automate your meetings?

Here are some ways AI meeting apps can boost your meeting productivity:

Automated meeting recording and notes

To automate your meeting, you can seamlessly incorporate AI meeting apps into your Google or Microsoft Teams calendar. When the meeting starts, AI meeting tools will automatically join the call and begin the recording and note-taking immediately.

In essence, AI meeting apps give a speaker ID for each meeting participant, so you can easily see who said what in the meeting transcription. An AI recording and note-taking can be essential if you can not involve other teammates in a crucial Teams call.

While it helps to make your meeting more productive by entirely focusing on the participants in the Teams meetings, you will surely not miss any critical points.

Meeting summary

Once the Teams calls are over, your AI meeting apps take care of sending meeting summaries to the colleagues who missed the call.

MeetGeek become a powerful tool when it comes to meeting summaries. It can automatically create highlights on the call and deliver them to the relevant people. Instead of reviewing the entire meeting notes, people can simply access the key details of the Teams call and easily search for the specific information they are interested in.

Increase sales efficiency 

An AI meeting assistant like Laxis helps you with meeting notes and boosts sales efficiency with AI-powered conversations and outreach. After your sales calls, Laxis generates follow-up emails, prepares summary reports, and sends the action items.

Also, Laxis’ AI SDR reaches out to leads, schedules meetings, and prioritizes them based on engagement potential so you can focus on the critical workflows.

Using Laxis, users reported a 45% faster follow-up response time and a 30% increase in meetings booked. Overall, an AI assistant like Laxis is an outstanding tool for sales times, as it saves time, helps to make the processes more streamlined, and increases conversions.

Meeting analysis

Once the Teams calls are over, AI meeting apps create key insights and details into speakers, topics, sentiments, and more. With this comprehensive data, you can easily compare trends and evaluate the overall quality of your team’s conversations.

While this feature might not be revolutionary regarding internal meetings, it can be valuable for sales or customer calls. Automatically receiving data about your Teams call offers an excellent opportunity to analyze your performance during essential meetings.

Collaborative meeting notes feature

Everyone can have a different takeaway from the same call, right? This is when the collaborative meeting notes can be a game-changer.

After or during the Teams meeting, the people involved in the call can access meeting notes to review how the meeting went. Furthermore, participants can easily edit meeting notes or share them with the relevant people.

For example, MeetGeek allows you to supplement AI-generated meeting summaries with your manual notes. It also supports smoothly exporting collaborative notes to platforms like Slack, Notion, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs.

Transcribe audio or video files

AI meeting apps allow you to upload audio files, video, or webinar recordings and convert them into text. Such a feature can be helpful in many scenarios.

Imagine making a blog post to include parts from your podcast. Instead of trying to capture your podcast’s main takeaways, you can transcribe it and re-use it for your blog post.

Noise cancelling

AI-powered noise canceling is a massive relief for people working in noisy environments. Krisp can entirely remove disruptive noise from all sides of the call.

So, you can chat without stressing if your client will hear the baby crying or the dog barking.

The best AI meeting apps

Interested in AI meeting apps to automate your Teams meetings? Dive into this article, where I have ranked and reviewed the 11 best AI meeting manager.

If you are looking for a tool only for meeting notes, whether it is Teams meeting transcription or personal note-taking, I ranked and reviewed the 8 best AI note-taking apps to help you select the one that suits your needs.

The overlap between AI meeting apps and AI note-taking tools is because AI meeting apps offer more features, even though they are pretty effective at taking notes.

Wrap-up

We are all spending a lot of time with weekly alignment, follow-up, or team calls based on the statistics. While it is tempting to skip them, there is a way to make them more productive.

Meeting notes are crucial, and there is no doubt about it. Whether using Microsoft Teams’ built-in feature or a third-party app, the key takeaway is that you should consider giving one of these tools a try to automate your meeting notes.

Once you start to use them, you will notice significant time-saving and more productive Teams meetings.

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Frequently asked questions

Where are the meeting notes in Microsoft Teams?

During the Teams call:

1. Start or join your Teams meeting.
2. Click on “Notes,” you can typically find after selecting “More” or the three-dotted menu.
3. You can now view the notes and continue editing or additions as needed.

After the Teams call:

1. Navigate to your Teams Calendar.
2. Choose the past meeting for which you would like to access the notes.
3. Expand meeting details.
4. Click on Details > Notes.
5. Select “Send update” to save and send the changes.

Can Microsoft Teams summarize meetings?

If Sales Copilot is integrated into a Teams meeting, it will automatically create a meeting summary when you record the meeting and the transcription is enabled. Microsoft Sales Copilot is an application that uses Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams to capture, retrieve, and log data into CRM systems.

How do you automatically take notes in Teams meeting?

To access the transcription function, these are the steps:

1. Start or join your Teams meeting.
2. Click on the three-dotted menu and select “Record and transcribe”.
3. Hit “Start transcription”.
4. You can see the live meeting transcription in action.