Balto: Real-time AI guidance and agent-assist platform that coaches contact-center and sales agents live during calls. Minutes: Open-source, local-first conversation memory layer that records and transcribes meetings, diarizes speakers, and stores searchable notes as markdown for AI agents. 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 Balto when guiding agents live through objections and compliance requirements matters most, and Minutes when recording and transcribing calls locally for users who refuse cloud meeting tools matters most. Test each on your own meetings; the right choice tends to become obvious quickly.
Real-time AI guidance and agent-assist platform that coaches contact-center and sales agents live during calls.
Open-source, local-first conversation memory layer that records and transcribes meetings, diarizes speakers, and stores searchable notes as markdown for AI agents.
Balto is a contact-center AI platform centered on real-time guidance during live customer and sales calls. Rather than focusing on post-call review, Balto listens to conversations as they happen and surfaces dynamic prompts, objection-handling cues, compliance checklists, and knowledge-base answers to the agent in the moment. Its Agent Assist pulls relevant information so reps can respond to customer questions instantly, while real-time QA automatically scores interactions across all calls and flags compliance risk early, maintaining an audit trail for supervisors. Coaching automation tailors recommendations to each agent's performance, and real-time note generation produces call summaries without manual write-ups. Balto also offers voice AI agents to handle high-volume, repeatable calls and supports omnichannel context across voice and digital channels. It integrates with CRMs and telephony systems such as Salesforce and RingCentral. The platform is used across industries including healthcare, insurance, banking, collections, and home improvement, and is aimed at contact centers and sales teams that want in-the-moment guidance, compliance assurance, and automated quality management at scale. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Minutes, built by Mat Silverstein, is an open-source, privacy-first conversation memory layer that captures meetings, calls, voice memos, and dictation and turns them into searchable, AI-accessible notes. It transcribes audio locally using whisper.cpp or Parakeet so audio never has to leave the machine, performs speaker diarization to separate voices, and extracts decisions and action items, writing everything to the user's own disk as plain markdown files with structured YAML frontmatter. Because the output lives in a local folder (for example ~/meetings/), the notes can sync across devices through iCloud, Dropbox, or Google Drive and can be read directly by AI tools. A central design goal is integration with AI assistants: Minutes runs an MCP server exposing a large set of tools so coding and chat agents such as Claude, Codex, Gemini CLI, and others can query past conversations, track relationships across meetings, and surface what was promised to whom. It ships as a macOS desktop app with a menu-bar recorder and AI assistant, plus a cross-platform command-line interface, and includes a dictation hotkey mode. The project is MIT licensed, installable via Homebrew, and actively maintained with frequent releases, making it a fully self-hostable option for people who want durable, private, searchable meeting memory rather than a cloud subscription. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Balto is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Minutes is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Balto | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Real-time, in-call guidance with dynamic prompts and objection cues | Local transcription with whisper.cpp or Parakeet, no cloud audio upload |
| Standout feature | Agent Assist that surfaces knowledge-base answers live | Speaker diarization to attribute who said what |
| Team usage | Automated quality assurance scoring across 100% of calls | Plain-markdown output with YAML frontmatter stored on your own disk |
| Integrations | Real-time compliance monitoring with audit trails | MCP server exposing tools so AI agents can query meeting history |
| Languages & capture | Automated call summaries and coaching recommendations | Cross-meeting search, relationship tracking, and action-item extraction |
| Best-fit workflow | Integrations with CRMs and phone systems such as Salesforce and RingCentral | macOS desktop app plus cross-platform CLI and dictation hotkey mode |
Balto
Choose Balto if you need guiding agents live through objections and compliance requirements — strengths include guides agents during the call rather than only analyzing afterward.
Minutes
Choose Minutes if you need building a private, searchable memory of meetings and voice notes that ai agents can query — strengths include fully local-first and mit licensed, keeping conversation data private and portable.
Balto
Minutes
It depends on your workflow. Balto is strong for guiding agents live through objections and compliance requirements, while Minutes is strong for building a private, searchable memory of meetings and voice notes that ai agents can query. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Balto is a free tier with paid upgrades and Minutes is a free tier with paid upgrades. Check each vendor's pricing page for the latest plans and free-tier limits.
Often yes: teams combine tools when one handles capture and another handles analysis.
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