The meeting transcription market has exploded since 2022. There are now dozens of tools that join your calls, record, transcribe and summarise. Here's how the main categories compare.
Bot-based cloud notetakers
Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Fathom, Read.ai and Avoma all work by having a bot join your calendar-linked meeting. The bot records, transcribes in the cloud and sends you a summary. These are the most polished experience: the bot handles consent banners, speaker ID, action item extraction and integrations with Slack, Notion and CRMs. Downside: audio is on their servers. Pricing ranges from free (with limits) to $20–$40/user/month.
Platform-native transcription
Zoom, Teams, Meet and Webex have built-in transcription. It is tightly integrated with the platform and often included in paid plans. Quality is generally good; summaries require a premium AI add-on (Zoom AI Companion, Microsoft Copilot). It does not work across platforms — if you use multiple video tools, you need platform-specific features for each.
Local on-device transcription (Ledgeur)
Ledgeur runs Whisper in your browser. Audio never leaves your device. No bot joins your call — you transcribe live by sharing audio to the tool, or upload a recording file after. It works with any meeting platform. There is no speaker diarization in the basic version. Best for: sensitive meetings, compliance-heavy environments and users who do not want third-party data access.
Which should you choose?
- Maximum convenience + don't care about data: Fathom (free tier is generous) or Otter.ai.
- Deeply integrated with Microsoft 365: Teams Copilot (expensive but native).
- Privacy-first, sensitive content, or no consent from attendees: Ledgeur.
- Recording an uploaded file (post-call): Ledgeur or AssemblyAI API.