How to use Fellow to record meetings without compromising your data

AI meeting assistants can save you hours of note-taking and follow-up work, but they come with a serious tradeoff: you're handing sensitive conversations over to a third-party tool and hoping those conversations stay between you and your coworkers—not you, your coworkers, and the entire internet. With data privacy regulations tightening and high-profile breaches making headlines, it's fair to wonder how safe those meeting recordings really are. 

Fellow is one of the best security-conscious AI meeting assistant options in the space. And it has the receipts to back it up. 

I took it for a test drive to see how its security features hold up alongside its core recording and transcription tools. Here, I'll share the five Fellow features you can use to make your meetings more productive—without putting your data at risk. 

Table of contents: 

• Record and transcribe meetings

• Protect your data with extra security measures

• Control who sees your meeting notes 

• Collaborate on meeting notes in real time

• Integrate Fellow with other apps 

1. Record and transcribe meetings

Similar to other AI meeting assistants, Fellow connects with popular video conferencing platforms like Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Once you link your calendar, Fellow's AI notetaker automatically joins your scheduled meetings and begins recording. 

If you're using Fellow's desktop app, you'll see a recording status (REC and a red dot means it's recording) at the bottom of the side panel. To pause or stop the recording, click the Pause or Stop icon next to the recording status. 

Once the meeting's over, Fellow will automatically add the video recording, AI-generated transcript, and notes to the corresponding meeting record in its software.

Fellow's AI meeting assistant is also able to detect different speakers and assign them accordingly to the transcription, which is particularly helpful for group calls where multiple people are talking back and forth. It saves you from having to untangle who said what after the fact.

Fellow doesn't get it right 100% of the time—for example, in the screenshot below, it incorrectly attributed "flat like a suitcase" to me when it actually came from the YouTube speaker. Still, it does a pretty good job overall. And if you need to re-assign who said what, Fellow lets you do this directly in the transcript. 

One downside is that Fellow doesn't have any native transcript editing features. But you can copy and paste the full transcript into another app and edit it there, if you want. 

2. Protect your data with extra security measures

Most AI meeting assistants offer some level of data protection. But Fellow takes things a step further by verifying all of its security measures through Vanta, a third-party trust management platform that independently audits a company's security practices. In other words, Fellow isn't just telling you it's secure; it's letting a trusted, external company confirm it.

Fellow complies with SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA. You can also browse its Vanta certifications to see exactly what measures it has in place, from employee background checks to malware protection. If your organization follows additional security standards beyond the big four, this transparency makes it easy to check whether Fellow meets those requirements, too.

3. Control who sees your meeting notes

Whether you're discussing sensitive client details or internal performance reviews, you need control over who has access to your meeting records and notes. Fellow gives you granular sharing controls so you can easily keep those locked down or visible to your team at large. 

To share a recording, click the Share button in the top-right corner of the meeting recording. From there, you can choose your access level:

• Restricted access: This limits access to people who were in the meeting. 

• Anyone in my workspace: This opens it up to your broader team. 

• Anyone with a link: This makes it easy to share the recording with external collaborators. 

You can also set up Fellow channels to streamline sharing for groups that meet regularly. Instead of manually sharing each recording with the same people every time, you create a channel once, set its permissions, and any recording you post to that channel is automatically available to everyone in it. Here's how to set it up. 

1. Click Library in the left sidebar.

2. Select the + icon next to My Channels.

3. Name your channel and give it a description. 

4. Add teammates to the channel (you can also add them later on). 

5. Click Create channel. 

4. Collaborate on meeting notes in real time

Fellow doesn't treat meeting notes as a one-person job. Anyone invited to a meeting who has a Fellow account and an approved workspace domain can edit the meeting agenda and notes directly—no special permissions needed. If you want to loop in someone who wasn't in the meeting, you can also share the notes and grant them editing access. 

Here's what that collaboration looks like in practice:

• Before a meeting, attendees can fill out a pre-made agenda template, ensuring everyone gets a chance to add topics they want to discuss.

• During the meeting, attendees can add notes in real time, so no single person is stuck capturing everything on their own.

• After the meeting wraps up, Fellow can automatically add recaps to future agendas, giving your team a running thread of context from one meeting to the next.

5. Integrate Fellow with other apps 

Fellow integrates with more than 50 apps, including Asana, Slack, and Salesforce, so you can push meeting insights into the tools your team already uses. But if you need to connect Fellow to an app that it doesn't natively support, you can use Zapier to fill in that gap. 

Zapier's Fellow integration allows you to connect with over 8,000 apps and AI tools so you can orchestrate end-to-end, AI-powered meeting workflows across your entire tech stack. 

For example, say your sales team uses Fellow to record client calls. Whenever Fellow generates new meeting notes, Zapier's built-in AI can automatically extract any product feedback or feature requests mentioned in the meeting, and then automatically create a new row in a Google Sheet or Airtable base that logs the client name, the feedback, and a suggested priority level. High-priority items can be automatically sent to Slack to be addressed quickly. Your product team gets a running log of customer insights from every sales call without anyone having to manually review transcripts or copy-paste into a spreadsheet. 

Keep your meetings secure with Fellow

Every meeting you record is a conversation someone trusts you to handle responsibly—whether it's a client sharing sensitive business details, a candidate opening up in an interview, or a team member raising a concern they wouldn't put in writing. Fellow gives you the tools to honor that trust. 

The desktop app has some rough edges, and you'll need a workaround for transcript editing. But if protecting your meeting data is a priority—and it should be—Fellow is a strong place to start. 

Fellow lets you create five free recordings—plenty to help give you an understanding of how it works and if it's right for you. Sign up for a free plan, make a few test recordings with your team, and see for yourself how it handles your workflow.

Related reading:

• The best transcription software

• Fathom vs. Fireflies: Which AI note taker is best? 

• What is Otter.ai?

• What is Granola.ai?