Our Honest Review of Vowel

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• Instant summaries, action items, and transcripts of meetings
• Search and create clips for any content
• Zapier integration with any application so you can transfer notes

• Great for live transcriptions, meeting agendas, and notes
• Stores everything related to your meetings in one place

• Only accessible in a browser as a separate app (no Google Meet/Zoom version)

Free for 40-minute meetings, $16.49/host/month

Putting AI in your meetings tends to give us the same set of solutions: a notetaker that records your meetings from Zoom or Google Meet and sends you a transcript afterwards.

There are about a dozen of these, and they all roughly do the same thing, with the same underlying tech approach.

So it's remarkable when we see a company doing something really new and different. In the space of AI meeting notes, that's Vowel.

Different from the ground up

The approach that most AI notetakers take is simplest for them to execute on, but it has clear challenges:

• They only process the meeting when it's done, so you end the call, wait, then get the summary
• This could take longer than you expect, especially when it bugs out! (At time of writing, we've been waiting 20 hours for a summary)
• They only summarize, not identify action items or anything more actionable

These are all points where Vowel stands out, because they've built a lot more tech behind the scenes:

• If you're running late, Vowel can give you an AI-generated summary as of that specific moment in the meeting
• Vowel auto-suggests action items based on your meeting
• You get the results in seconds, not minutes or hours. It's very fast.

Note: it wants to replace your video conferencing

If you already use Google Meet, Microsoft Teams or Zoom and can't switch - this might be a friction point for you. Ultimately, Vowel seems to want to replace those solutions outright.

There's no option to have it join an existing Meet/Teams/Zoom call, even if you want it to. That's probably for tech reasons as much as it is for strategy reasons.

Is it worth the switch? If you have the flexibility, yes.

It's not just the AI features where Vowel shines. It also has some quality-of-life improvements that your existing providers can't seem to get to:

• A shared doc in every meeting, almost like an embedded Google Doc
• Bookmark key moments while in the call
• A running list of shared links

Vowel: free to start

If you want to give it a shot, Vowel has a free plan which offers 40 minutes / meeting and up to 12 participants. That's generous. That unfortunately only covers the base product (no AI features). For the latter, you'll want to give the free trial a shot.

Every 5-10 years, we get a new video conferencing solution to try. As the age of AI progresses, Vowel is definitely one to try.