Choosing an AI note taker for D&D: Discord bot, upload, or neither

What an AI note taker for D&D does, and the AI it is not

An AI note taker for D&D is software that listens to your session and writes the notes afterwards: a transcript, a recap of what happened, and in the better ones a running record of every NPC, place and promise the table mentioned. A human still runs the game. The software is the scribe nobody at the table volunteers to be.

AI and D&D also meet in a completely different kind of product, and search results mix the two freely. One kind runs the game for you: AI Dungeon calls itself a free AI text adventure game, and Friends & Fables runs campaigns with its own AI Game Master (both self-descriptions are in the table at the end of this page). Those replace the DM. The other kind remembers a game a human ran, and that is the only kind this page covers.

If you searched for an AI dungeon master assistant, the second kind is usually what you were after: something that keeps the campaign straight so your prep starts from what actually happened. The test takes one question. If a tool never asks for a recording, a transcript or your notes, it cannot be remembering your campaign, whatever else it is good at.

And the useful output is not the transcript. Four hours of table talk runs to tens of thousands of words, most of it rules chatter and jokes. What you need next week is short: who the party met, what they promised, what they believe that is wrong, and what is still open. The note-taking guide explains why those are the things worth keeping; a good note taker is one that finds them for you.

Why meeting note takers struggle with a D&D session

The obvious first try is the note taker you already use at work. It usually disappoints, for reasons that have little to do with how well it hears.

Length comes first. Meeting tools cap a single conversation well short of a four-hour session on their cheaper plans: the Otter comparison has Otter's dated caps, and the transcription roundup covers the same limit in other meeting tools. A session cut into several recordings is notes in pieces, and the cut tends to land mid-scene.

Shape is the subtler problem. A meeting summary is organised around decisions, owners and action items, because that is what a meeting produces. A session produces names, promises, rumours and grudges, and a summary that turns a tense parley with a dragon into three action items has misunderstood what happened.

Then the vocabulary. General speech models spell invented names by sound, and differently each week, so session three's notes and session nine's disagree about the villain, and searching for her finds half the mentions. Six people talking over each other at exactly the exciting moments does not help either.

None of that makes meeting tools bad. If you already pay for one and your sessions are short, run one game through it before you buy anything else; it may be enough.

The real choice: a Discord bot or record-and-upload

Most comparisons of D&D note takers list features. The decision that actually sorts them is simpler: how does the audio reach the tool? There are two answers, and each one rules some tables out completely.

A Discord note taker bot joins your voice channel, usually when someone runs a slash command, records the session, and posts notes back into the server afterwards. There is no file to handle. Because a bot hears each player on their own audio stream, which is how Craig can hand you one file per speaker, bot-based tools can say who said what without guessing, and the bot sitting in the member list is a visible sign that the game is being recorded. The limit is just as plain: it only works when the whole game happens in Discord voice, on a server where you are allowed to add a bot.

Record-and-upload works everywhere else. A phone face up in the middle of a kitchen table, a Zoom local recording, an OBS capture or a Craig download all become a file you send to the tool after the game. That covers in-person tables, every virtual tabletop and every voice platform, at the cost of one more step, and from a single mixed file a tool has to tell voices apart by sound to label speakers, which some advertise and some do not. The recording guide covers getting audio worth uploading.

DM Scribe, which publishes this guide, is purely the upload kind: it has no Discord bot, does not label speakers and does not transcribe live during play. Discord tables that use it record with Craig and upload the file afterwards, the workflow in the Discord recording guide. If you want everything to happen inside Discord with no files at all, one of the bots further down will suit you better than we will.

Some of the D&D-specific tools take audio both ways, through a bot and through an upload, which is the right shape for a group that alternates between online and in-person sessions. The short version:

• Pick a bot if every session happens in Discord voice, nobody wants to handle audio files, and you want to know who said what.
• Pick record-and-upload if you play in person, play somewhere other than Discord, or cannot add bots to the server you use.
• Pick a tool that does both if your table switches between the two.

Seven questions to ask any D&D note taker app

Once you know which side of that fork you are on, these are the questions that separate what is left. Feature grids answer them badly, because every tool has a box labelled recaps; the useful answer is always in the detail.

The checklist after the questions turns them into one sheet per tool you try. Run the same real session through every tool you are considering, because ten minutes of test audio tells you nothing about hour three, and keep the one whose recap you would actually read out at the table.

• How is it metered: by the hour, by the session or by the minute? A four-hour game is one session, four hours or 240 minutes, and which meter is cheapest depends entirely on how long and how often your table plays. What a session costs to transcribe has the arithmetic.
• Does it label speakers, and do you need that? For a recap, rarely. For quoting players, scripting an actual-play episode or settling who promised the duke what, yes, and it comes most easily from a bot or from per-speaker tracks.
• Does it remember, or only recap? A recap per session is a stack of documents you still have to read. Memory is a record that accumulates: NPCs, places and threads that update as sessions pass, ideally with a way to ask a question and be pointed at the session that answers it.
• Does it learn your names? Ask whether it feeds your campaign's own vocabulary to the transcription, or whether you will be correcting the same villain's name every week.
• Can your players see it without seeing your secrets? A player-safe view turns notes into a shared campaign record. Check that it hides your private notes, and which plan it is on.
• Is the free tier a plan or a trial, and does it hold a whole session? That gets its own section below.
• What happens to the audio afterwards? It holds your players' voices, not just yours. Look for a stated answer on retention and deletion before the first upload, not after.

AI NOTE TAKER CHECKLIST
Tool: ______________   Tested on session #: ____
Table agreed to be recorded?  Y / N  (everyone, out loud)

AUDIO IN        [ ] Discord bot   [ ] upload   [ ] in-app recorder
METERED BY      [ ] hour   [ ] session   [ ] minute
                my session length: __ h   cost per session: ______
SPEAKER LABELS  [ ] yes   [ ] no        do I need them?  Y / N
MEMORY          [ ] recap only   [ ] NPC list or wiki
                [ ] questions answered with the session cited
LEARNS NAMES    [ ] glossary or name list   [ ] no
                names it got wrong: __________________
PLAYER VIEW     [ ] none   [ ] shared, GM secrets hidden
                on which plan: ______
FREE TIER       [ ] renews monthly   [ ] one-time trial   [ ] none
                holds a full session?  Y / N
AUDIO AFTER     [ ] kept   [ ] deleted   [ ] not stated

Same real session through every tool. Keep the one whose
recap you would actually read out at the table.

Which AI note takers exist for D&D, sorted by how they work

There is no single best AI note taker for D&D, because the best one for a Discord table is a poor pick for a kitchen table. Everything below is described from each company's own site, as read on the date in the table at the end of this page. We have not tested their accuracy, and no prices are repeated here.

These D&D-specific tools have their own comparison pages on this site, each with current dated pricing, sources and a section on who should choose them: Archivist AI, The DM's ARK, Loreify, Saga20, Tabletop Arc and GM Assistant. Start there if you want the numbers side by side.

The bot-first and app-first tools below have no comparison page, so here is what each one says it is:

• Crit Scribbler: a Discord bot built for D&D notes, with a free plan that renews monthly.
• Recap Raven: a Discord bot that writes player-safe recaps, keeping your private GM notes out of them; it says it knows who said what, and offers a permanent free plan.
• DiscMeet: a general Discord transcription bot that courts RPG groups as well as work teams. It advertises speaker identification, posts notes as a thread when the call ends, and offers a free trial rather than a free plan.
• DND Scrybe: the upload kind, a web app you send a recording to after the game, with the first session free.
• SessionKeeper: records three ways (in its own iOS, Android and web app, through a Discord bot, or from an upload) and lists only paid plans.

Free AI note takers for D&D: a plan, a trial, or neither

Free covers three different things in this category, and only one of them lasts.

A free plan renews: a small allowance every month for as long as you like, which is what Crit Scribbler and Recap Raven offer. A free trial is spent once, like DND Scrybe's first session or DiscMeet's trial recordings. And some tools have no free tier at all; SessionKeeper's pricing page lists only paid plans. The table at the end of this page quotes each one.

Whatever the shape, check that it holds an entire session before you judge the output. A trial capped below your session length shows you the first act and none of the parts you wanted notes on. DiscMeet's trial recordings, for one, are shorter than most D&D sessions; the figure is in the table.

There is also a fully free route with no account anywhere: record with Craig or a phone on the table, transcribe on your own machine with Whisper, and do the summarising yourself or with a general AI assistant. It costs an evening of setup and some time every week instead of money. The Whisper guide covers the transcription half, and the NotebookLM guide covers one way to handle the rest.

When you should not use an AI note taker at all

Every tool on this page starts with a recording, so the first condition is a table that agrees to be recorded: everyone, out loud, for this campaign. If one player is uncomfortable, that settles it, and no product is worth the game. The consent guide covers how to raise it.

Some tables also lose something by automating. For some players, keeping notes is part of how they play, and a rotating scribe makes it a shared ritual rather than a chore; the player note-taking guide is the place to start if that is your group.

And for short or occasional games, a page of paper is often enough. The session notes templates and an NPC tracker template cost nothing, and twenty lines written during play beat four hours of audio nobody opens. An AI note taker earns its place when a campaign runs long enough that what happened in session four starts to matter in session twenty.