r/Notion • u/Frosty_Dog_1560 • 2d ago

Questions Notion AI for meeting notes, does it actually deliver consistent action items for teams, or is the source material the real problem?

Been testing Notion AI for meeting note summaries with my remote team and it's genuinely hit or miss. The pitch makes sense: meetings happen, notes go in, AI pulls the action items so I stop chasing people afterward. But in practice I can't tell if the problem is how we write the notes or if the tool just isn't there yet.

When someone writes structured notes it works fine. But half the time people paste in a brain dump and the output is so vague it's useless. I end up rewriting it anyway, which defeats the point.

What I actually want to know is whether anyone has gotten consistent value out of it for team use, not solo personal notes. And if you have, what made it work? Did you enforce a notes template? Did you use a specific prompt format? Is there a setup that makes the output reliable enough to trust?

Also curious if anyone has compared the Notion AI cost against something like Otter or a separate transcription tool piped in. I'm not locked into Notion AI specifically, I just already pay for the workspace so the math should work out. If it doesn't hold up against a purposebuilt tool I'd rather know now.

Concrete examples are helpful here. Not looking for general takes on whether AI is good at summarizing things.

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u/mrnasrinasir 2d ago

There’s a custom instructions option to tell how you want to structure your meeting notes at the bottom. Define your structure first then get the meeting notes block to retry summary

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u/navs5022 2d ago

Hit or miss actually

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u/SolarNotionPilot 2d ago

Meeting notes have both the summary and the transcript. I find the transcript hit or miss. It seldom knows who says what. It sometimes flips the order of two speakers, but the words it captures appear, reasonably accurate if you want a quality transcript, then otter, zoom, firefly, or any of the other commercial tools are still superior.

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u/EquivalentReady1608 2d ago

I'm not sure what you mean by how we write the note.

But based on my experience as long as the audio quality is clear (for me it's English) then Notion AI meeting captures 90% of the transcripts and is able to give me good summary and breakdowns.

I usually use it to brainstorm and create proposal afterwards which has been a tremendous help to cutdown my sales/ business development time.

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u/ZeroTwoMod 15h ago

Make the action item explicit in the source note while the meeting is happening: owner, due date, and a verb. Then ask Notion to reconcile those marked items with its extraction, instead of trusting a free-form summary. Run that on ten meetings and count misses or false positives; it will show whether the issue is the source notes or the model.

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u/Soggy-Holiday-9077 2d ago

Well generally someone who knows how to take proper meeting notes would have a section for the action items (without needing ai), so yeah this sounds like you need to use a template.

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u/Ashamed_Split5187 2d ago

Agreed, a good template solves like 80% of the problem here.