Amber Notes: EU-focused AI meeting notetaker by Dutch company Amberscript, with EU-only data hosting, multilingual transcription and an Ask Amber chat. 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. Which one wins depends on your platform mix, budget, and how hands-off you want notes to be.
How Hosiqo compares and tests toolsFinal recommendation
Shortlist Amber Notes when capturing and summarizing meetings for european teams with strict data-residency needs matters most, and Handy when privacy-sensitive voice-to-text where audio must stay on-device matters most. Test each on your own meetings; the right choice tends to become obvious quickly.
EU-focused AI meeting notetaker by Dutch company Amberscript, with EU-only data hosting, multilingual transcription and an Ask Amber chat.
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.
Amber Notes is an AI meeting notetaker built for Europe by Amberscript, a Dutch transcription company based in the Netherlands. It is offered as a distinct meeting-focused product (at ambernotes.eu and notes.amberscript.com) with web access and mobile apps for iOS and Android. Amber Notes records, transcribes and summarizes meetings automatically across a wide range of European languages and dialects, with speaker identification that works across multiple participants. It produces intelligent summaries (including via custom prompts), extracts action items automatically, and offers an Ask Amber chat that lets users query their meeting history in natural language. The product supports both bot-based capture for virtual meetings on Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet and a mobile app for recording in-person meetings on the go, with summaries reviewable from a phone and synced to the desktop workspace. Its core privacy proposition is that all meeting data stays on EU servers and never leaves the European Union; the company states it does not use meeting content to train AI models and that the platform is ISO 27001 and ISO 9001 certified and aligned with GDPR. Amber Notes is actively operating in 2025/2026 with current mobile app listings and a live pricing page. 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
Amber Notes 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 | Amber Notes | Handy |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Automatic recording, transcription and summarization of meetings | Push-to-talk and toggle dictation modes with a configurable global keyboard shortcut |
| Standout feature | Speaker identification across multiple participants | Fully offline, on-device transcription with no cloud uploads |
| Team usage | Action-item extraction and custom-prompt summaries | Multiple local speech models including Whisper (GPU-accelerated) and Parakeet V3 (CPU, auto language detection) |
| Integrations | Ask Amber natural-language chat over meeting history | Silero Voice Activity Detection to filter silence and process only speech |
| Languages & capture | Bot capture for Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet plus a mobile app for in-person meetings | Automatically pastes transcribed text into any active application text field |
| Best-fit workflow | Support for a broad range of European languages and dialects | Cross-platform desktop app (macOS, Windows, Linux) built with Tauri |
Amber Notes
Choose Amber Notes if you need capturing and summarizing meetings for european teams with strict data-residency needs — strengths include strong eu data-residency stance with meeting data kept on eu servers.
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.
Amber Notes
Handy
It depends on your workflow. Amber Notes is strong for capturing and summarizing meetings for european teams with strict data-residency needs, while Handy is strong for hands-free dictation into emails, documents, chat apps, and code editors. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Amber Notes 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.
Yes. Many teams run more than one meeting assistant when the workflows are complementary.
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