Blog
Notes on private meeting transcription — bot-free AI notetakers, BYOK setups, and comparisons to what's on the market.
Head-to-head: 3 no-bot AI notetakers, WER tested
Hands-on comparison of AI Assist, Granola, and MacWhisper on the same 20-min audio. Word error rate vs. Whisper large-v3, trust boundaries, cost — including the parts that make AI Assist look worse than I'd like.
What actually leaves your machine when you use an AI notetaker
Otter, Fireflies, Granola, AI Assist — a category-by-category breakdown of what data (audio, transcript, LLM prompts, metadata) leaves your machine when each is running, and to whose servers.
How to stop Otter, Fireflies, and Read.ai from joining your meetings
Step-by-step: identify the bots, remove them from calendar invites, block them at the meeting host level, and pick a replacement that doesn't need a bot in the first place.
Tactiq alternative that respects your API keys
Tactiq is the leading Chrome-extension notetaker for Google Meet, but it's cloud-only and gives you no control over the LLM stack. Here's a head-to-head with AI Assist for engineers and PMs who want BYOK.
Bring your own OpenAI + Anthropic key for meeting notes
What "BYOK" actually means for an AI notetaker — the cost math against Otter Business, why per-seat markups exist, and how to set up meeting notes that bill through accounts you already own.