Can You Make an AI Notetaker Use Your Own Notes Template?

Yes, and that is the least useful part of the answer

Every tool on a typical shortlist now lets you define your own notes format. Granola has custom templates with a purpose, a style and named sections. Otter has Meeting Types, with prebuilt and custom templates and questions it answers in the summary. Fireflies has Custom Summary Templates, written as instructions or learned from sample notes you paste in. Fathom lets team admins attach a default summary template to a meeting type.

So a yes from a sales page tells you nothing. Four other questions decide whether a template saves you time or quietly makes your notes worse: what it writes under a heading nobody spoke to, whether it can reshape meetings you already had, who controls which template runs, and what it costs to have more than one.

The heading nobody talked about

A template is a prompt. Each section heading is an instruction to produce something, and a model given an instruction tends to produce something. That is fine when the meeting covered every section. It is a problem when it did not.

Take a discovery call template with five sections: pain, current tool, budget, decision maker, next step. The call is good, but budget never comes up. A well behaved tool leaves the budget section empty or says it was not discussed. A badly behaved one writes a sentence that sounds like a budget finding, built from the prospect's company size or an aside about cost. Three weeks later that sentence is in a pipeline review, and nobody remembers that the call never covered it.

None of the four vendors' help pages say what their template does with an uncovered section, so test it yourself before you trust it. Build a template with one section the next meeting will certainly not touch, such as "Pricing objections" on an internal standup, and read what comes back.

Write the instruction so silence is an allowed answer

Granola's own advice is to write a template in three parts: the purpose and context of the meeting, the length and style you want, and the sections. That is good advice. Add one line to every section that is not guaranteed to come up: if this was not discussed, write "Not discussed" and nothing else.

Two more habits help. Phrase sections as questions rather than topics. "What did they say they use today, in their words?" gets a quote or a gap. "Current tool" gets a paragraph. Otter's Meeting Types work this way, with summary questions such as what the client wanted and what decisions were made. And keep the template short. Five sections that fit most of your calls beat twelve that fit one, because every extra heading is one more place for filler to appear.

Meetings you already had

Changing your mind about the format is normal, and tools differ on whether your past notes follow. Granola says you can change templates after notes are generated, and the notes regenerate in the new format. Fireflies lets you preview a custom template against a meeting, apply it to that meeting, and then choose whether it becomes your default for all meetings. Fathom's meeting type templates only work on new calls, and its help page says editing a meeting type's description does not reclassify meetings already identified.

This matters most in the first fortnight, when you are still finding the format that works. If your tool cannot reapply a template to past meetings, the first two weeks of notes stay in whatever shape you started with.

Who chooses the template

For one person this does not matter. For a team it decides whether notes are consistent or not. Fathom puts the choice with team admins, and its help page says a meeting type template overrides a user's personal default. Fireflies lets a workspace admin set one template for everyone or a different one per user group, while a person's own custom templates are personal and do not change summaries for anyone else. Otter applies templates automatically from rules on calendar titles, participants or keywords. Granola templates are private by default and can be shared with your organisation, but its docs note that sharing only reaches people signed in with the same company email domain, and is not offered on a free email address.

Pick the model that matches how your team works. If a sales manager needs every discovery call in one shape, admin enforced defaults are what you want. If each consultant runs their own clients, personal templates with optional sharing will fit better.

What it costs to have more than one

Check this before you design six templates. Fireflies says your first Custom Summary Template is included at no extra cost and creating more than one consumes AI credits. Fathom's meeting types are a Team Edition feature, on its Team and Business plans. Plans change often, so read the current plan page of whichever tool you are trialling instead of trusting a comparison table, including this one.

Where Driffle stands

Driffle has a templates screen with built in formats, such as a 1:1, a discovery call, a retrospective and a design review, which you can duplicate and edit. A template has a meeting context field and sections, and each section has a title and its own instructions for Driffle. Templates are private to you until you share them with your workspace, and you can make a shared one private again.

Applying a template regenerates a note section by section, using only what is in that note. When the note does not support a section, Driffle is built to leave it empty rather than write something plausible, and the heading stays so you can see the gap. That is the behaviour the test above is looking for.

Be clear on the limits. In the current release, your own templates regenerate written or pasted notes. Recorded meetings get a summary whose sections follow the conversation rather than a fixed format, and Driffle does not yet apply a template to recorded meetings automatically by meeting type or set one workspace default. If every recorded call must come out in one enforced format today, Fathom's meeting types or Fireflies' workspace templates do that, and you should weigh that properly. Driffle runs on Macs with Apple Silicon, captures your Mac's microphone and system audio with no bot in the call, and does its processing in the cloud.

If you want to try it on your own meetings, Driffle is at driffle.ai/download.