aTrain: Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection. ownscribe: Local-first command-line tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings on macOS entirely on-device, with natural-language search across notes. 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 aTrain when researchers transcribing recorded interviews for qualitative analysis matters most, and ownscribe when keeping fully on-device transcripts and summaries for privacy-sensitive discussions matters most. Run both through a week of actual calls to see which suits your workflow.
Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection.
Local-first command-line tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings on macOS entirely on-device, with natural-language search across notes.
aTrain is a free, open-source desktop application for offline speech transcription, developed by researchers at the Business Analytics and Data Science Center of the University of Graz in Austria. It provides a graphical interface around OpenAI's Whisper model (via the faster-whisper implementation) so users with no programming experience can transcribe recorded meetings, interviews, lectures, and other audio. Because all processing happens locally on the user's own computer, no audio or text is uploaded to any server, which makes it well suited to privacy-sensitive and GDPR-conscious environments such as universities, public institutions, and research teams. aTrain supports a wide range of languages and adds speaker detection through pyannote.audio so contributions from different participants can be separated. Transcripts can be exported in formats compatible with qualitative-analysis software such as MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti, and NVivo. It runs on Windows (including a Microsoft Store distribution) with GPU acceleration on NVIDIA hardware, and is distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is best for researchers, academics, and organizations that need accurate, local, no-cloud transcription of recorded conversations. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
ownscribe is a local-first meeting transcription and summarization command-line tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings entirely on the user's own machine without sending data to external servers. It is MIT-licensed and actively maintained, with v0.12.0 released in June 2026, and is written primarily in Python with a Swift component for system audio capture. On macOS 14.2 and later it captures system audio through Core Audio, and it transcribes with WhisperX to produce word-level timestamps, with optional speaker diarization via PyAnnote. For summaries it ships with a built-in local model (Phi-4-mini) and can also connect to Ollama or OpenAI-compatible backends, offering multiple templates tailored to meetings, lectures, and brief summaries. A standout feature is its natural-language search: the ask command lets users query across their stored meeting notes to retrieve relevant information. Quality-of-life features include silence-based auto-stop so recordings end cleanly when a meeting goes quiet. Because it is a CLI distributed through GitHub and runs entirely on local hardware, ownscribe targets developers and privacy-focused users who prefer scriptable, terminal-driven workflows over a graphical meeting notetaker while keeping all audio and transcripts on-device. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
aTrain is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); ownscribe is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | aTrain | ownscribe |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Offline, fully local transcription with no data leaving the device | Local-first recording, transcription, and summarization via CLI |
| Standout feature | Built on OpenAI Whisper via the faster-whisper engine | System audio capture on macOS 14.2+ through Core Audio |
| Team usage | Speaker detection/diarization using pyannote.audio | WhisperX transcription with word-level timestamps |
| Integrations | Exports compatible with MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti, and NVivo | Optional speaker diarization via PyAnnote |
| Languages & capture | Graphical interface requiring no programming skills | Local summarization with a built-in Phi-4-mini model, plus Ollama and OpenAI-compatible backends |
| Best-fit workflow | NVIDIA GPU acceleration support | Natural-language search across meeting notes with the ask command |
aTrain
Choose aTrain if you need researchers transcribing recorded interviews for qualitative analysis — strengths include free and open source under agpl-3.0.
ownscribe
Choose ownscribe if you need developers capturing and summarizing meetings from the terminal on a mac — strengths include runs entirely on-device with no data sent to external servers.
aTrain
ownscribe
It depends on your workflow. aTrain is strong for researchers transcribing recorded interviews for qualitative analysis, while ownscribe is strong for developers capturing and summarizing meetings from the terminal on a mac. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
aTrain is a free tier with paid upgrades and ownscribe is a free tier with paid upgrades. Check each vendor's pricing page for the latest plans and free-tier limits.
Sure. Running both makes sense when their strengths don't overlap and the budget allows.
More head-to-head comparisons involving aTrain and ownscribe.
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aTrain: Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection. monday.com AI Notetaker: monday.com's native AI Notetaker joins video calls to transcribe, summarize, and turn discussions into action items inside the monday.com work platform. We compare them on cost, capture approach, and day-to-day fit so you can choose faster.
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123 Notetaker AI: Microsoft Teams marketplace app from BlueSky Apps that shows live transcription in the Teams sidebar and emails AI meeting notes afterward. aTrain: Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection. We compare them on cost, capture approach, and day-to-day fit so you can choose faster.