u/Ill-Mulberry-9362

I record a lot of calls- client work, 1-on-1s, the occasional therapy session - and I got tired of two things:

1. Bots announcing themselves in meetings
2. My audio sitting on someone else's servers

So I spent a couple of weeks trying the main privacy-focused options. Here's where I landed.

1. mono. records system audio directly from your computer, so no bot joins the meeting and nobody on the other side sees anything. Transcription runs locally. Summaries, action items, semantic search, chatting with past meetings, etc. all run on-device too. Works with basically anything that plays audio.
2. Otter. Probably the most well-known option. Transcription is good, integrations are good, everything feels polished. But it uses the standard "bot joins the meeting" approach and everything gets processed in the cloud. Around $17/month too. Also had some privacy-related legal issues recently.
3. Fireflies Very similar story to Otter. Bot joins the meeting, recordings get processed in the cloud, search works well, integrations are solid. Pricing starts reasonable but gets expensive once you need the better features.
4. Krisp - one thing I really like here: no bot. The noise cancellation is genuinely excellent and it works across different apps. But transcription and notes are still cloud-based, and it's another subscription.
5. Tactiq. Also no bot. It works from meeting captions, which is nice from a privacy perspective. The downside is that it's mostly a Chrome/browser solution, so it doesn't help much for desktop apps or in-person conversations.

Anyone else using something for in-person meetings that can rival Otter?