Can an AI Notetaker Prep You Before Your Next Meeting?

A brief is last call's notes, read back to you

Every pre-meeting brief is built mostly from what the tool kept from your earlier calls with the same people. If the last call's notes recorded that the client would send pricing by Friday, the brief can remind you to ask for it. If the notes said only that pricing was discussed, the brief has nothing to remind you of.

So a brief is a check on the notes you already have, delivered at the one moment you will actually read them. That makes two questions matter more than how polished the brief looks: does it turn up for the meetings where you need it, and does each line point back to where it came from?

Which meetings get a brief

This is where the tools differ most, and the help pages are specific about it.

Granola's docs say briefs are prepared overnight and appear when you open the note for an upcoming meeting, usually as two or three bullets. They are generated only for meetings with people outside your organization, so internal meetings get none. They need Google Calendar connected, and they are listed for Business and Enterprise users only.

Fireflies cuts the other way. Its Meeting Prep page says a brief can cover internal and external meetings with at least one other attendee that run five minutes or longer, with a connected calendar. But the prep email, the part that arrives without you opening anything, goes out one hour before recurring meetings only. Its email settings page says prep emails are not sent for one-time meetings.

We found no scheduled pre-meeting brief in Otter's or Fathom's help centers. Both have chat assistants you can ask about past calls, which works when you remember to ask.

Notice what falls through. The meetings where walking in cold costs the most are the occasional ones: an investor you update every quarter, a client you speak to every six weeks, a candidate's second round. These are usually one-off invites, so a recurring-only email misses them. And an external-only rule skips the internal meeting with the colleague who made you a promise last month.

What it reads besides your notes

Granola's docs list five sources: your previous notes with the same people or company, relevant shared notes in your workspace, the wider web including LinkedIn, the calendar event, and Gmail if you connect it. Its launch post says every fact is cited and you can see the steps it took. Fireflies says its brief is generated from your previous meetings with the same attendees: key points, open action items and decisions that may need revisiting.

More sources help with a first meeting, when your own notes have nothing. They also mean the brief can contain things nobody on your team said, from a profile page or an email thread you have forgotten. Citations are what let you tell those apart, so check that every line in a trial brief has one.

Who else gets it

Fireflies' email settings page says the Meeting-prep email is set to All participants by default, meaning everyone on the recurring invite receives it. Your prep for a weekly client call, including open action items from the last one, can land in the client's inbox an hour before you speak. The other options are Only me and Do not send.

Fireflies is also inconsistent about whether the feature is on at all. Its Meeting Prep page, updated five days before we read it, says Meeting Prep is enabled by default. Its email notifications page, updated three months earlier, says the skill is not enabled by default. Check your own settings rather than trusting either page.

What it does with nothing to say

The weakest brief is a confident one written from almost nothing. Granola's troubleshooting section says it will not generate a brief when it cannot find enough useful information, such as a new contact with no online presence and no history, and that it would rather show nothing than pad the brief. That is the right instinct. Ask any vendor what their brief says for a first meeting, and look at one before trusting the others.

A three meeting test

Pick three meetings in the coming week: a recurring call, an occasional call with someone you have met before, and a first meeting. Before each one, note whether a brief existed, where it appeared and who else received it.

Then read each line and ask where it came from. Is there a commitment still marked open that was finished a week ago? Is there a line from the web or your inbox you cannot trace? During the occasional call, make one specific commitment with a date. Before your next meeting with that person, see whether it shows up, with the right owner.

What Driffle does, limits included

In Driffle, you open an upcoming meeting from the Coming up list on Home and it builds a prep page for that calendar invite. It shows earlier recorded meetings from the same invite, who is coming and when you last spoke with each of them, and the open commitments, decisions and questions from that meeting series, each with its owner and due date and flagged when overdue. For a recurring meeting there is a Carried over from last time section, and Bring these up lists the open next steps from the last call.

When you press Start meeting, those items come with you into the live note as a Cover these checklist, so the prep is in front of you during the call, not in a tab you closed. For a first meeting it says so plainly: First time with, then the names, and that Driffle has no earlier meetings, open threads or owed items with them yet.

The limits: the prep page reads your recorded meetings and your Driffle workspace, not your email or the web, so it has little to offer before a first call. It is built when you open it, so open it a few minutes before the meeting. It needs Google Calendar, and Google has not yet verified that connection; Outlook and iCloud calendars are not supported. Some lines name the meeting they came from without linking to it, and the suggested asks show no source. Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon as a direct download, records with no bot in the call, and does its transcription and AI work in the cloud. To run the three meeting test on it, download Driffle for Mac at driffle.ai/download.