Dovetail: Customer insights platform that centralizes interviews and feedback, with AI transcription, analysis, search, and a research repository. aTrain: Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection. 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 Dovetail when transcribing and analyzing user research interviews matters most, and aTrain when universities and public bodies needing gdpr-friendly local transcription matters most. Test each on your own meetings; the right choice tends to become obvious quickly.
Customer insights platform that centralizes interviews and feedback, with AI transcription, analysis, search, and a research repository.
Open-source offline transcription tool from the University of Graz that turns recorded meetings and interviews into text using Whisper and speaker detection.
Dovetail is a customer insights and research platform that centralizes qualitative data from user interviews, sales calls, support tickets, and research studies into a single repository powered by AI. Teams can upload or import interview recordings and let Dovetail handle AI transcription, then analyze the material to turn raw feedback into structured intelligence. Its AI capabilities include automatic analysis, AI chat and search across customer data, AI dashboards that visualize trends alongside business metrics, and AI docs for creating shareable outputs. The research repository organizes studies, transcripts, tags, and highlights so insights remain searchable and reusable across projects, and highlight reels let teams clip and share video evidence of key moments. Dovetail supports transcription in multiple languages and includes redaction of sensitive information for privacy. It connects to other tools through integrations and an API so customer signals can flow across a team's stack. Used by product, design, research, and customer experience teams, Dovetail aims to replace assumption-based decisions with evidence drawn directly from customer conversations and feedback. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
aTrain is a free, open-source desktop application for offline speech transcription, developed by researchers at the Business Analytics and Data Science Center of the University of Graz in Austria. It provides a graphical interface around OpenAI's Whisper model (via the faster-whisper implementation) so users with no programming experience can transcribe recorded meetings, interviews, lectures, and other audio. Because all processing happens locally on the user's own computer, no audio or text is uploaded to any server, which makes it well suited to privacy-sensitive and GDPR-conscious environments such as universities, public institutions, and research teams. aTrain supports a wide range of languages and adds speaker detection through pyannote.audio so contributions from different participants can be separated. Transcripts can be exported in formats compatible with qualitative-analysis software such as MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti, and NVivo. It runs on Windows (including a Microsoft Store distribution) with GPU acceleration on NVIDIA hardware, and is distributed under the AGPL-3.0 license. It is best for researchers, academics, and organizations that need accurate, local, no-cloud transcription of recorded conversations. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Dovetail is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); aTrain is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Dovetail | aTrain |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | AI transcription of interview and meeting recordings | Offline, fully local transcription with no data leaving the device |
| Standout feature | Automatic analysis that turns raw feedback into structured insights | Built on OpenAI Whisper via the faster-whisper engine |
| Team usage | AI chat and search across all customer data | Speaker detection/diarization using pyannote.audio |
| Integrations | Research repository for transcripts, tags, and highlights | Exports compatible with MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti, and NVivo |
| Languages & capture | Highlight reels and video clips of key moments | Graphical interface requiring no programming skills |
| Best-fit workflow | AI dashboards, AI docs, and sensitive-information redaction | NVIDIA GPU acceleration support |
Dovetail
Choose Dovetail if you need transcribing and analyzing user research interviews — strengths include centralizes interviews and feedback from many sources in one repository.
aTrain
Choose aTrain if you need researchers transcribing recorded interviews for qualitative analysis — strengths include free and open source under agpl-3.0.
Dovetail
aTrain
It depends on your workflow. Dovetail is strong for transcribing and analyzing user research interviews, while aTrain is strong for researchers transcribing recorded interviews for qualitative analysis. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Dovetail is a free tier with paid upgrades and aTrain 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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