Ava: AI live captioning and transcription app for accessibility, providing real-time captions for conversations and video meetings. noScribe: Free, open-source desktop transcriber that runs Whisper and pyannote fully locally with speaker identification and a synchronized editor. The right pick comes down to team size, budget, and the workflows you want to automate.
How Hosiqo compares and tests toolsFinal recommendation
Shortlist Ava when real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants matters most, and noScribe when journalists generating diarized transcripts of recorded conversations matters most. Try them side by side on real calls before deciding — needs vary by team.
AI live captioning and transcription app for accessibility, providing real-time captions for conversations and video meetings.
Free, open-source desktop transcriber that runs Whisper and pyannote fully locally with speaker identification and a synchronized editor.
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
noScribe is a free, open-source desktop transcription tool that runs entirely on the user's own computer to protect the confidentiality of recordings. Licensed under GPL-3.0 and actively maintained, with a v0.7.2 maintenance release in June 2026, it is built around OpenAI's Whisper (via the faster-whisper library) for speech recognition and pyannote for speaker diarization, so it can distinguish between different speakers and label who said what. It understands around 60 languages and supports automatic or manually specified speaker counts. noScribe is primarily designed for producing high-quality transcripts of interviews for qualitative social research and journalistic work, and it ships with a dedicated companion editor, noScribeEdit, that synchronizes audio playback with the transcript text and provides search and replace, formatting, zoom, and playback-speed controls. It supports Windows (with optional CUDA acceleration on Nvidia GPUs), macOS on Apple Silicon, and Linux in both CPU and CUDA versions. Additional capabilities include batch transcription, pause detection and marking, an experimental overlapping-speech detection mode, and export to multiple formats such as HTML, VTT, and TXT, plus an available command-line interface for scripted use. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Ava is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); noScribe is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Ava | noScribe |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Integration with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams | Fully local transcription using Whisper via faster-whisper |
| Standout feature | Real-time live captions for in-person and online conversations | Speaker diarization with pyannote (automatic or manual speaker counts) |
| Team usage | Color-coded speaker identification | Support for around 60 languages |
| Integrations | Optional professional scribe service for higher accuracy | Synchronized companion editor (noScribeEdit) with playback follow-along |
| Languages & capture | Mobile, web, and desktop apps | Batch transcription, pause detection, and experimental overlapping-speech detection |
| Best-fit workflow | Saved transcripts and conversation summaries | Exports to HTML, VTT, and TXT plus a command-line interface |
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.
noScribe
Choose noScribe if you need researchers transcribing qualitative interviews while keeping data on their own machine — strengths include runs 100% locally to keep sensitive recordings confidential.
Ava
noScribe
It depends on your workflow. Ava is strong for real-time captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing participants, while noScribe is strong for researchers transcribing qualitative interviews while keeping data on their own machine. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Ava is a free tier with paid upgrades and noScribe 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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