Somewhere in weeks of recurring project meetings is the answer to "when did we agree to move the launch?" — and scrubbing through recordings to find it can eat an entire afternoon. Our top pick, Notta, turns that archive into something you can query in seconds: it combines keyword, speaker, date and full-text search with Brain, an AI chat that works across your meetings and uploaded files, and its answers keep clickable timestamps so you can jump straight to the moment a decision was made. Notta Pro costs $8.17 a month billed yearly ($97.99 a year), with the Brain add-on at $93.59 a year. In manual testing of AI chat history, Notta was among the few tools whose answers kept cited timestamps visible, scoring 4 out of 5. If your decisions also live in email and chat, Read AI (Pro $15 a user per month, billed yearly) searches all three together; Otter.ai is strong on speaker-attributed answers; Fireflies.ai is the cheap route to team-wide search; and Fathom is the best free starting point.
01 — Best overall for searching past meetings
Notta
| Price | Pro $8.17/month billed yearly ($97.99/year); Brain add-on $93.59/year |
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Notta is the tool we would try first when you need to find something that was said weeks ago. It offers keyword, speaker, date and full-text search, so you can narrow an archive of recurring meetings to "everything Sarah said in March" before you even ask a question. Its Brain AI then works across meetings and uploaded files, and answers keep clickable timestamps that link back to the exact moment in the recording (audio playback is linked for recordings under 90 minutes). In manual testing of whether AI chat answers keep cited timestamps and text, Notta scored 4 out of 5 — ahead of Otter, Fireflies and Read AI, which each scored 3.
Cons
- The main caveat is that storage and history vary by plan, and the Brain add-on is priced separately.
02 — Best for searching meetings, email and chat together
Read AI
| Price | Pro $15/user/month billed yearly, $19.75 monthly; Free includes 5 meetings/month |
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Read AI's standout strength is scope: on all plans you can ask Read across meetings, emails and messages, so a decision that was confirmed over email after the call is still findable. In testing, Read AI scored 4 out of 5 for summarizing multiple meetings but 3 out of 5 for keeping cited text in AI chat answers and 3 out of 5 for finding content by date, and its folder summary scored 2 out of 5. The free plan is limited to 5 meetings a month, so it is really a paid tool for search use cases.
03 — Best for answers with speaker and timestamp attribution
Otter.ai
| Price | Pro $8.33/month billed yearly, $16.99 monthly (50 chat queries); Business $19.99/month yearly, $30 monthly (200 queries); Basic 20 queries |
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Otter's AI Chat works within and across meetings, and its answers carry speaker attribution and timestamps — useful when the question is "who agreed to this?" The catch is capacity: chat queries are capped at 20 per user on Basic, 50 on Pro and 200 on Business. In testing, Otter's answers didn't show the cited text behind them, scoring 3 out of 5 on AI chat history. Paid plans include unlimited conversation history, but Basic only shows your 25 most recent conversations.
04 — Best value for team-wide search
Fireflies.ai
| Price | Pro $10/seat/month billed yearly, $18 monthly |
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Fireflies pairs a global smart search across your meeting history with AskFred, its AI assistant, and organises team search into channels so a whole project group can query the same archive. Answers come with timestamped context, though testing scored its AI chat history 3 out of 5. The free plan includes 400 minutes per team, which runs out quickly if you record every recurring meeting.
05 — Best free starting point
Fathom
| Price | Free; Team $15/user/month billed yearly (2-user minimum) |
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Fathom's free plan includes clips, playlists and search across your calls, which makes it the easiest way to start searching a meeting archive without paying. Account-wide Ask Fathom is still labelled a beta feature, and team-wide global search across colleagues' calls requires the Team plan. In testing, Fathom scored 4 out of 5 for keeping cited timestamps in AI chat answers — one of the better results — though its lookback window for team calls depends on plan tier.
How we chose
We judged each tool on five things that decide whether you can actually find a past decision. First, what gets searched: transcripts only, or meetings plus email and chat. Second, whether AI chat answers link back to the exact timestamp and speaker, so you can verify them. Third, lookback and caps: how far back the archive goes and how many questions you can ask per month. Fourth, whether search covers the whole team's meetings or only your own. Fifth, price per user. Our evidence base is competitor research (checked 2 September 2026), vendor pricing pages (checked 29 October 2026) and manual testing of AI chat history — the scores are not independent measurements. Where a tool's search behaviour could not be confirmed in detail, we say so.
Keyword search or AI chat: which do you need to find a past decision?
Keyword search finds exact words; AI chat finds answers you can't phrase exactly, but you must check its citation. If you remember that someone said "launch slips to June", a keyword or global search over transcripts will surface the meeting in seconds. If you only remember the shape of the decision — "when did we agree to move the launch, and who pushed for it?" — cross-meeting AI chat is the better fit, because it can read weeks of meetings and answer in a sentence. The trade-off is trust: an AI answer without a citation is just a claim, which is why we weight tools whose answers keep visible timestamps. Notta is the strongest option here because it gives you both modes in one place — keyword, speaker, date and full-text search to narrow the archive first, then Brain to ask questions across the filtered meetings and files. Read AI and Fireflies similarly offer both global search and cross-meeting AI chat, while Otter's strength is chat with speaker attribution and Fathom's account-wide Ask Fathom is still in beta.
Can you search the whole team's meetings or only your own?
Most tools default to searching only the meetings you attended. Fathom's Team plan ($15/user/month billed yearly, 2-user minimum) adds global search across team calls; Fireflies organises shared search into channels, so a project channel can query everyone's meetings about that project; and Sembly groups meetings into collections for a similar effect. Notta's speaker, date and full-text filters work across the meetings and files in your workspace, which matters on recurring project meetings where the person who needs the answer wasn't in the room. Whatever tool you choose, check the permissions model: search that spans the team should respect who is allowed to see which recordings, especially for client meetings where the transcript is confidential. If your team already shares a workspace, test team-wide search with a meeting that contains sensitive content before rolling it out.
Can you search meetings from ChatGPT or Claude instead?
Increasingly, yes. Several meeting tools expose their transcripts to AI assistants through MCP servers, so you can ask Claude or ChatGPT to search your meeting history without opening the meeting tool's own app. Otter has been building agentic chat and MCP support for exactly this kind of meeting-history querying. The in-app search in tools like Notta and Fireflies is still the more direct route for everyday questions, but MCP is worth exploring if you already live in an AI assistant. Our guide to exporting meeting transcripts with MCP covers how it works and which tools support it.
What about the AI built into Teams, Zoom and Google?
The built-in options are improving but remain narrower. Microsoft Copilot Search can find content across your Teams meetings, Zoom offers in-platform search over its recordings, and Gemini can search documents in Drive. The limitation is scope: they search their own ecosystem's meetings, so a decision confirmed on a different platform, in an uploaded recording, or over email may be invisible to them. Dedicated tools like Notta and Read AI aggregate meetings across platforms — and in Read AI's case email and chat too — which is usually what a project team with a mixed meeting stack needs. If a built-in summary covers your needs, our comparison of built-in meeting summaries versus dedicated tools goes deeper.
Frequently asked questions
Can I search all my meeting transcripts at once?
Yes. Notta's keyword, speaker, date and full-text search work across all the meetings and files in your workspace, and Brain can answer questions across them with clickable timestamps you can verify. Otter's AI Chat also works within and across meetings, subject to per-user query caps (20 on Basic, 50 on Pro, 200 on Business), and Fireflies offers global smart search plus AskFred, with team search organised into channels. In testing, Otter and Fireflies both scored 3 out of 5 for keeping cited timestamps and text in AI chat answers, so click through to the source before quoting an answer.
Does Slack search include huddle transcripts?
No. Slack states that huddle transcripts are embedded in the notes canvas but won't show up in search results, so a decision made in a huddle is effectively unsearchable in Slack itself. If your team runs decisions through huddles, a dedicated note taker that captures and transcribes them is the more reliable archive — our guide to AI note takers for Slack Huddles and WhatsApp calls covers the options.
Is there a free tool that searches across meetings?
Fathom's free plan includes search across your calls and is the best free starting point, though account-wide Ask Fathom is still in beta and team-wide search needs the Team plan. MeetGeek includes AI chat and search across all meetings even on its free Basic plan, but caps recording at 3 hours a month. Otter's free Basic plan allows 20 chat queries a month and shows only your 25 most recent conversations, and tl;dv's free archives are deleted after 3 days — in testing, its free tier hit an AI chat limit requiring payment. Notta also offers a free plan if you want to test its search workflow on your own meetings before paying, though storage and history limits vary by plan.
How do I find which meeting a decision was made in?
Start with filters, then ask. In Notta, narrow the archive by speaker and date — for example, the people in the launch decision plus the weeks it could have happened — then ask Brain "when did we decide to move the launch, and who agreed?" and click the cited timestamp to verify. In Otter, ask AI Chat across meetings and check the speaker attribution and timestamp on the answer. The verification step matters: AI chat across meetings can misattribute or paraphrase, so treat the citation, not the answer, as the source of truth.
Does AI chat across meetings make things up?
It can. Cross-meeting AI chat summarises and paraphrases large amounts of transcript, and answers without visible citations are hard to verify. In manual testing, tools scored between 3 and 4 out of 5 for keeping cited timestamps and text in their answers — better than nothing, but not perfect. Prefer tools whose answers keep clickable timestamps (Notta, Fathom and tl;dv scored highest in that testing), and always open the cited moment in the recording before repeating a quote or a decision in a report.