Best AI tools for meeting transcription 2026

2016-2022: From manual notes to meeting assistant bots

Until recently, the traditional way to avoid missing the key points from a meeting in Teams or Zoom was to have one person take notes. Companies often assigned someone to write down the main ideas and the questions raised during the call. At the same time, for someone who joined as an attendee, the only option was often to use a separate screen recorder and then rewatch the call video later to find the information they needed.

This was, and still is, tiring and inconvenient, but many people continue to do it because they do not know about the alternatives. Between 2016 and 2020, a number of meeting assistant tools entered the market, including Otter. Most of them used a bot-based model: a bot joined the meeting, recorded the conversation, and generated a transcript afterward.

This method can be useful for people who organize meetings, but it is much less convenient for those who join as a guest, without adding bots to the call and without being the host. That is why many users are now looking for Otter alternatives for recording and transcribing meetings silently and without notification.

2022 to today: From transcription AI models to Live Recording Transcription

Before 2022, some AI speech-to-text solutions already existed, including AI models like Deepgram. But in 2022, transcription of meetings, audio and video files became much more common, helping start a broader AI race around speech-to-text technology.

In 2022, OpenAI released Whisper, its AI model for speech recognition. After that, other AI transcription options gained attention as well, including higher-cost models focused on transcription accuracy, such as ElevenLabs, Deepgram Nova, and AssemblyAI.

Using AI new models, developers built many tools for turning meetings in Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, and other platforms into text. Each product has its own strengths, limitations, and workflow, so it is worth comparing them before choosing the AI tool that fits your needs.

Otter

The California-based company Otter has been on the market for about 10 years and offers a narrow meeting assistant product. Otter is mainly positioned for B2B use and business executives, and it has become a familiar option in corporate environments.

Its meeting bot, Otter Notetaker, joins meetings in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, with integrations for those platforms. Because of that Otter has become a common way to transcribe and summarize meetings in recent years, especially during the Covid pandemic, but it also has its own limitations. This is especially true for users who want to record and transcribe online meetings as participants, without being the host and without host permission. Otter simply doesn't support this.

Otter also cannot be used to record and transcribe audio from calling and conferencing tools such as Webex, GoTo Meeting, Jitsi, or custom meeting platforms, for example, specialized video conferencing systems built by universities for online classes, lectures, and webinars.

RiverScript

The app captures and transcribes everything you can hear on your computer, no matter which software is playing the audio. That means it works not only with common meeting apps like Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet, but with virtually any audio source. RiverScript can record and transcribe audio from less common conferencing tools like Webex, Gotomeeting, and Jitsi, where AI transcription options have often been limited. It can also capture and transcribe audio from completely custom apps or websites, such as platforms with university lectures or webinars. RiverScript’s Live Recording Transcription can transcribe everything you hear.

This makes RiverScript a modern alternative to Otter, especially for people who want to record and turn meetings into text as a guest without meeting bots.

RiverScript also uses the most advanced speech-to-text AI models available today from ElevenLabs, OpenAI, and Deepgram, synchronized with each other to deliver the highest transcription quality.

And if you have already recorded your meeting and simply want to transcribe it from an audio or video file, the RiverScript desktop client supports files up to 50 GB in size and up to 8 hours long.

File transcription in RiverScript is, on average, 3–5 times faster than in competing browser-only tools because RiverScript does not upload large video files to a server. Instead, it does most of the work directly on the user’s computer. This makes RiverScript a fast and capable alternative to TurboScribe.

Overall, RiverScript brings the full workflow into one product: record internal audio on Windows and macOS, transcribe it, create an AI summary, and even translate the result into multiple languages with AI quality. RiverScript is a modern European alternative to American transcription products.

TurboScribe

TurboScribe, an AI file transcription service launched in 2023, became widely used because it made OpenAI’s Whisper transcription model accessible to users around the world. TurboScribe offers a straightforward workflow: upload a file to the website and get text back.

There are also practical limitations. Since TurboScribe is a browser-only web service with a 5 GB file size limit, and uploading files, especially large video files, can take a long time. In some cases, it can turn into a half-day process. In addition, the service relies on Whisper and does not use other transcription models. Whisper itself can sometimes produce speech recognition hallucinations: it may try to interpret background noise or music as words. It can also insert phrases into silent parts of a recording, such as “Thanks for watching”, because Whisper was trained on a large collection of YouTube videos.

HappyScribe

HappyScribe is one of the older players in the transcription market. It started in 2017 with a focus on manual transcription and human proofreading. With the rise of AI transcription models in recent years, HappyScribe has added them to its service and shifted more focus toward AI transcription for meetings.

Like Otter, HappyScribe has its own bot for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. The bot appears as a meeting participant, making it unsuitable for users who need to record meetings silently without adding an assistant. HappyScribe does not have a feature for recording and transcribing internal audio, but it does offer its own Chrome extension meeting recorder. The extension can record browser audio, but it cannot record system audio from other installed apps.

HappyScribe also supports file transcription. However, since the product does not have its own desktop app for Windows or Mac, the file size is limited to 1 GB. It does support batch uploads of up to 25 files.

Comparison & Alternatives table: Otter, RiverScript, HappyScribe, and TurboScribe