Buzz: Popular open-source desktop app that transcribes and translates audio offline on your own computer using OpenAI's Whisper. Level AI: Level AI is a contact center conversation intelligence platform that transcribes, scores, and analyzes voice and text customer interactions with automated QA and real-time agent assist. Here's where each one pulls ahead on pricing, features, and the meetings it suits best.
How Hosiqo compares and tests toolsFinal recommendation
Shortlist Buzz when transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline matters most, and Level AI when coaching contact center agents using transcript-based insights and real-time call guidance matters most. Trial each on a few real meetings before you commit — the better fit usually shows fast.
Popular open-source desktop app that transcribes and translates audio offline on your own computer using OpenAI's Whisper.
Level AI is a contact center conversation intelligence platform that transcribes, scores, and analyzes voice and text customer interactions with automated QA and real-time agent assist.
Buzz is a widely used open-source desktop application that transcribes and translates audio offline on the user's personal computer, powered by OpenAI's Whisper. It is MIT-licensed and actively maintained, with v1.4.4 released in March 2026, and it has grown a large community with roughly 19.7k GitHub stars. Buzz runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux, with installation options including Flatpak, Snap, and PyPI. It supports both importing existing audio and video files and real-time transcription from microphone input, and it can export results in formats such as TXT, SRT, and VTT for subtitling and documentation. The app includes an advanced transcript viewer with search and playback controls, a watch folder for automatically transcribing new files, and a command-line interface for automation. It offers GPU acceleration through CUDA for Nvidia cards, Apple Silicon support, and Vulkan for many other GPUs, which makes faster transcription practical even on laptops. Buzz also provides speaker identification and speech separation for noisy audio, plus a plugin system that adds capabilities like AI-generated summaries. Because all processing happens locally, recordings and transcripts remain on the user's machine rather than being uploaded to a cloud service. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Level AI is a customer experience platform built for enterprise contact centers that captures, transcribes, and analyzes customer conversations across voice calls, chat, email, and bot interactions. Its proprietary speech-to-text engine, trained on noisy call center audio and fine-tuned to each customer's terminology, converts spoken conversations into searchable transcripts. On top of that transcription layer, Level AI applies semantic intelligence (natural language understanding) rather than keyword matching to detect intent, sentiment, and compliance issues, aiming to monitor 100% of interactions instead of a small sampled fraction. The platform automates quality assurance by scoring conversations against custom scorecards, including open-ended criteria via its QA-GPT feature, and surfaces coaching opportunities. A real-time Agent Assist module suggests next-best actions during live calls, and analytics dashboards extract voice-of-customer insights and dissatisfaction drivers. It is aimed at QA, CX, and operations teams in financial services, healthcare, insurance, and retail. Level AI also offers AI virtual agents for call deflection and screen recording for agent monitoring.
Best suited for
Buzz is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Level AI is custom pricing (contact sales). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Buzz | Level AI |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Offline transcription and translation using OpenAI's Whisper | Speech-to-text transcription of voice calls plus ingestion of chat, email, and bot text across channels |
| Standout feature | Real-time transcription from microphone input | Semantic conversation intelligence using NLU to detect intent, sentiment, and compliance signals |
| Team usage | Speaker identification and speech separation for noisy audio | Automated quality assurance scoring of 100% of interactions via custom scorecards and QA-GPT |
| Integrations | Exports to TXT, SRT, and VTT | Real-time Agent Assist that surfaces recommended responses and guidance during live calls |
| Languages & capture | Watch folder for automatic transcription and a command-line interface | Analytics dashboards for voice-of-customer insights, dissatisfaction drivers, and root-cause analysis |
| Best-fit workflow | GPU acceleration via CUDA, Apple Silicon, and Vulkan | Agent screen recording and AI virtual agents for call triage and deflection |
Buzz
Choose Buzz if you need transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline — strengths include fully offline so audio and transcripts stay on the user's computer.
Level AI
Choose Level AI if you need automatically scoring and auditing agent calls and chats for quality assurance at scale — strengths include transcription engine is trained specifically on noisy contact center audio and tuned to customer-specific terminology.
Buzz
Level AI
It depends on your workflow. Buzz is strong for transcribing recorded meetings, interviews, podcasts, or lectures offline, while Level AI is strong for automatically scoring and auditing agent calls and chats for quality assurance at scale. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Buzz is a free tier with paid upgrades and Level AI is custom pricing. Check each vendor's pricing page for the latest plans and free-tier limits.
You can — some teams pair them when each covers a different part of the meeting workflow.
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