Will Your AI Notetaker Cut Off a Three Hour Meeting?

The limit is usually on your plan, not in the product

A three hour planning session, a half day client workshop, an offsite that runs long. These are the meetings where the most gets decided, and they are the ones most likely to hit a limit you never read.

Otter's pricing page lists a maximum transcription time per conversation of 30 minutes on Basic, 90 minutes on Pro and 4 hours on Business and Enterprise. Fireflies' help page says its bot can stay in a meeting for 2 hours on Free and Pro, 3 hours on Business and 4 hours on Enterprise. Read.ai lists 1 hour per meeting on Free, 4 hours on Pro and Enterprise, and 8 hours on Enterprise+.

So the honest answer to whether a notetaker handles long meetings is that it depends on which plan the person recording is on. On a team where one person pays and another runs the workshop, that is easy to get wrong.

What happens at the limit is different for each tool

Otter does not stop. Its help page for the free plan says that if a conversation runs past 30 minutes, the recording carries on, but you can only see the first 30 minutes of the transcript. The rest becomes available if you upgrade and click Unlock full transcript.

Fireflies leaves. When the bot reaches the time limit for your plan it exits the meeting on its own. To keep recording you add it back with Add to Live Meeting, the host gets a prompt to admit it, and the meeting is saved in two parts.

Read.ai also leaves, and builds its meeting report from what it collected up to that point.

We could not find a per meeting cap in Fathom's or Granola's help centers. That is not proof there is none, so ask before you rely on either for a long session.

The part you lose is the part that matters

A cut off never takes a random slice of a meeting. It takes the end. In a long session the end is where someone says right, so who owns this, and by when. It is where the open questions get parked, the next session gets booked and the decision from the morning gets confirmed or quietly reversed.

A recap of the first two hours of a three hour workshop can look complete. It has a summary, a list of topics and some action items. What it is missing is the ten minutes where those action items got owners, and nothing on the page tells you that.

The second limit: notes that run out of room

Even with no recording cap, a long meeting tests the notes. A summary has to fit within the space the AI is given to write it, and three hours of discussion can produce more decisions, tasks and open questions than fit. A tool that hits that ceiling can hand you notes that stop early and look finished.

Driffle had exactly this bug. Before version 0.1.51, a very long meeting's notes could be cut short with no sign that anything was missing. The fix was to make the gap visible. When the notes for a meeting come back incomplete, Driffle now shows a banner on the note that reads: This meeting was large. Some content may be missing. Version 1.0.27 fixed a related problem where a long meeting's notes could look stuck after three minutes; Driffle now keeps waiting while they are still being written.

Whatever tool you use, ask whether it tells you when the summary did not cover the whole meeting.

What Driffle does with a long meeting

Driffle records on your Mac with no bot in the call, so there is no participant to time out, nothing that has to leave and be readmitted, and no host prompt halfway through a workshop. There is no maximum recording length. It stops when the call ends, or after 15 minutes in which no speech was transcribed.

That second rule matters for workshops. If the room breaks for lunch and nobody near the Mac talks for 15 minutes, Driffle stops and tells you. Press Resume when you come back and it continues in the same meeting, so the morning and afternoon stay in one note.

Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon as a direct download, and its transcription and AI work happen in the cloud.

Test it before the workshop, not during it

Check the plan of the person who will actually record. Look up the per meeting limit for that plan, not the one on the pricing page you read last month.

Then record one real session of two hours or more. Make sure something gets decided in the last ten minutes: an owner and a date for one task. When the notes arrive, read the end first. If that task is missing, or the transcript stops before the meeting did, you have found your limit before a client workshop did it for you.

If you want a notetaker with no bot and no recording cap that tells you when a long meeting's notes may be incomplete, download Driffle for Mac at driffle.ai/download.