Aircall: Cloud phone and call center platform with built-in AI conversation intelligence: transcription, call summaries, sentiment, and call scoring. Handy: Handy is a free, open-source, cross-platform push-to-talk app that transcribes your speech to text completely offline and pastes it into any text field. Here's where each one pulls ahead on pricing, features, and the meetings it suits best.
How Hosiqo compares and tests toolsFinal recommendation
Shortlist Aircall when running outbound and inbound sales calling with ai transcription matters most, and Handy when privacy-sensitive voice-to-text where audio must stay on-device matters most. Trial each on a few real meetings before you commit — the better fit usually shows fast.
Cloud phone and call center platform with built-in AI conversation intelligence: transcription, call summaries, sentiment, and call scoring.
Handy is a free, open-source, cross-platform push-to-talk app that transcribes your speech to text completely offline and pastes it into any text field.
Aircall is a cloud-based phone and call center platform widely used by sales and support teams, with an integrated AI conversation intelligence layer that runs across calls rather than as a separate bolt-on system. Its core function is to handle business calling through features like power dialing, call recording, IVR, queueing, and routing, while Aircall AI transcribes conversations and analyzes them for insights. The conversation intelligence capabilities include AI-generated call summaries, key topic recognition, sentiment analysis, talk-to-listen ratios, transcription text search, and call scoring, which together help teams spot coaching opportunities and understand customer objections and buying signals. Aircall centralizes communications in a Workspace that brings voice, text, voicemail, and WhatsApp into a threaded view around each customer, with access to recordings and transcripts. The platform logs activity and transcripts to connected CRMs, and an analytics add-on extends dashboards with advanced filters, longer history, and KPI drill-downs. Aircall is aimed at sales and customer-facing teams that want a reliable cloud phone system with conversation intelligence included, rather than running a separate dialer and analysis tool. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Handy is a free, open-source desktop application that turns your voice into text completely offline, with no audio ever leaving your computer. You press a configurable keyboard shortcut, speak, and release (push-to-talk), or use a toggle mode to start and stop; Handy transcribes what you said and automatically pastes the result into whatever text field is active. Because it runs entirely on-device, it is built for privacy-conscious users who want dictation without cloud uploads or subscriptions. Under the hood it is built with Tauri (a Rust backend with a React/TypeScript frontend) and supports multiple local speech-recognition models, including OpenAI's Whisper variants with GPU acceleration and the CPU-friendly Parakeet V3 model with automatic language detection. Silero Voice Activity Detection filters out silence so only speech is processed. Handy runs on macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon), Windows, and Linux, and is released under the MIT license. It positions itself as an accessible, extensible alternative to paid dictation tools, and is best suited for hands-free typing rather than recording multi-party meetings.
Best suited for
Aircall is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Handy is open source (open source). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Aircall | Handy |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Cloud calling with power dialing, recording, IVR, and routing | Push-to-talk and toggle dictation modes with a configurable global keyboard shortcut |
| Standout feature | AI call summaries with key topic recognition | Fully offline, on-device transcription with no cloud uploads |
| Team usage | Sentiment analysis and talk-to-listen ratios | Multiple local speech models including Whisper (GPU-accelerated) and Parakeet V3 (CPU, auto language detection) |
| Integrations | Transcription with text search and call scoring | Silero Voice Activity Detection to filter silence and process only speech |
| Languages & capture | CRM logging and an advanced analytics add-on | Automatically pastes transcribed text into any active application text field |
| Best-fit workflow | Cloud calling with power dialing, recording, IVR, and routing | Cross-platform desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) built with Tauri |
Aircall
Choose Aircall if you need running outbound and inbound sales calling with ai transcription — strengths include conversation intelligence is built into the phone system itself.
Handy
Choose Handy if you need hands-free dictation into emails, documents, chat apps, and code editors — strengths include completely free, open-source (mit) with no subscription or paywall.
Aircall
Handy
It depends on your workflow. Aircall is strong for running outbound and inbound sales calling with ai transcription, while Handy is strong for hands-free dictation into emails, documents, chat apps, and code editors. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Aircall is a free tier with paid upgrades and Handy is open source. Check each vendor's pricing page for the latest plans and free-tier limits.
You can — some teams pair them when each covers a different part of the meeting workflow.
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