Ava: AI live captioning and transcription app for accessibility, providing real-time captions for conversations and video meetings. Meeting Transcriber: Open-source, local-first macOS app that auto-records Teams, Zoom, and Webex calls and transcribes, diarizes, and summarizes them entirely on-device. 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 Ava when real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants matters most, and Meeting Transcriber when recording and summarizing teams, zoom, or webex calls without inviting a cloud meeting bot matters most. Trial each on a few real meetings before you commit — the better fit usually shows fast.
AI live captioning and transcription app for accessibility, providing real-time captions for conversations and video meetings.
Open-source, local-first macOS app that auto-records Teams, Zoom, and Webex calls and transcribes, diarizes, and summarizes them entirely on-device.
Ava is a live captioning and transcription service built primarily for deaf and hard-of-hearing users, as well as for organizations that need accessible meetings and conversations. The app captures audio from in-person conversations and from video conferencing tools, then generates real-time captions on a phone, computer, or in the meeting interface. Ava combines automatic speech recognition with an optional professional scribe service for higher-accuracy, ADA-compliant captioning, giving users a choice between fast AI captions and human-assisted transcription. Features include color-coded speaker identification so users can follow who said what, support for many languages, and stored transcripts and summaries after a conversation ends. Through its Ava Connect integration, the service connects with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and it is available across mobile (iOS and Android), web, and desktop (Windows and Mac). Ava is aimed at individuals who need accessibility support in daily conversations and meetings, as well as at educational institutions, healthcare providers, corporations, and event venues that must provide compliant real-time captioning without committing to a traditional CART contract. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Meeting Transcriber is an open-source, local-first meeting transcriber for macOS, distributed under the MIT license and developed in the open on GitHub (pasrom/meeting-transcriber) with its own product site at meetingtranscriber.app. It runs as a menu bar application that automatically detects and records calls on Teams, Zoom, and Webex, capturing the meeting app's audio and your microphone as separate tracks so that transcription and speaker separation stay clean. Transcription happens fully on-device using one of three selectable speech-recognition engines: WhisperKit (covering 99+ languages), Parakeet TDT v3 (25 European languages with a small, fast model), or Qwen3-ASR (30 languages, requiring macOS 15+). It performs dual-track diarization and can recognize recurring speakers by storing voice embeddings across meetings and matching them with cosine similarity. After a meeting, it can generate a structured Markdown protocol containing a summary, participants, topics discussed, decisions, tasks, open questions, and the full transcript, using either the Claude Code CLI, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama or LM Studio, or a transcript-only mode with no LLM. Because everything runs locally, audio, transcripts, and summaries stay on the user's Mac. It installs via Homebrew Cask and requires macOS 14.2 or later. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Ava is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Meeting Transcriber is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Ava | Meeting Transcriber |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Integration with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams | Automatic recording of Teams, Zoom, and Webex meetings via a macOS menu bar app |
| Standout feature | Real-time live captions for in-person and online conversations | On-device transcription with selectable engines: WhisperKit, Parakeet TDT v3, or Qwen3-ASR |
| Team usage | Color-coded speaker identification | Dual-track diarization with separate app and microphone tracks for clean speaker separation |
| Integrations | Optional professional scribe service for higher accuracy | Recurring-speaker recognition using stored voice embeddings matched by cosine similarity |
| Languages & capture | Mobile, web, and desktop apps | Structured Markdown protocols (summary, participants, topics, decisions, tasks, open questions, transcript) |
| Best-fit workflow | Saved transcripts and conversation summaries | Pluggable summarization backends: Claude Code CLI, OpenAI-compatible APIs (Ollama, LM Studio), or transcript-only |
Ava
Choose Ava if you need real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants — strengths include strong accessibility focus for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.
Meeting Transcriber
Choose Meeting Transcriber if you need privacy-conscious professionals who want meeting transcripts and notes kept on their own mac — strengths include fully open source under the mit license with development in the open on github.
Ava
Meeting Transcriber
It depends on your workflow. Ava is strong for real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants, while Meeting Transcriber is strong for privacy-conscious professionals who want meeting transcripts and notes kept on their own mac. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Ava is a free tier with paid upgrades and Meeting Transcriber is a free tier with paid upgrades. 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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