Balto: Real-time AI guidance and agent-assist platform that coaches contact-center and sales agents live during calls. noScribe: Free, open-source desktop transcriber that runs Whisper and pyannote fully locally with speaker identification and a synchronized editor. 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 noScribe when journalists generating diarized transcripts of recorded conversations matters most. Run both through a week of actual calls to see which suits your workflow.
Real-time AI guidance and agent-assist platform that coaches contact-center and sales agents live during calls.
Free, open-source desktop transcriber that runs Whisper and pyannote fully locally with speaker identification and a synchronized editor.
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
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
Balto 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 | Balto | noScribe |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Real-time, in-call guidance with dynamic prompts and objection cues | Fully local transcription using Whisper via faster-whisper |
| Standout feature | Agent Assist that surfaces knowledge-base answers live | Speaker diarization with pyannote (automatic or manual speaker counts) |
| Team usage | Automated quality assurance scoring across 100% of calls | Support for around 60 languages |
| Integrations | Real-time compliance monitoring with audit trails | Synchronized companion editor (noScribeEdit) with playback follow-along |
| Languages & capture | Automated call summaries and coaching recommendations | Batch transcription, pause detection, and experimental overlapping-speech detection |
| Best-fit workflow | Integrations with CRMs and phone systems such as Salesforce and RingCentral | Exports to HTML, VTT, and TXT plus a command-line interface |
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.
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.
Balto
noScribe
It depends on your workflow. Balto is strong for guiding agents live through objections and compliance requirements, while noScribe is strong for researchers transcribing qualitative interviews while keeping data on their own machine. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Balto 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.
Sure. Running both makes sense when their strengths don't overlap and the budget allows.
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