Dscout: Experience research platform for moderated interviews, diary studies, and usability testing with AI transcription, themes, and analysis. Meeting Transcriber: Open-source, local-first macOS app that auto-records Teams, Zoom, and Webex calls and transcribes, diarizes, and summarizes them entirely on-device. 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 Dscout when running and transcribing moderated user interviews matters most, and Meeting Transcriber when recording and summarizing teams, zoom, or webex calls without inviting a cloud meeting bot matters most. Trial each on a few real meetings before you commit — the better fit usually shows fast.
Experience research platform for moderated interviews, diary studies, and usability testing with AI transcription, themes, and analysis.
Open-source, local-first macOS app that auto-records Teams, Zoom, and Webex calls and transcribes, diarizes, and summarizes them entirely on-device.
Dscout is an experience research platform that pairs human participant feedback with AI tools to help teams gather and analyze qualitative insights at scale. It supports a range of research methods, including live and uploaded moderated interviews, usability testing with heat maps and task success metrics, real-time site intercepts, field studies, diary studies with multiple activities, and media-rich surveys. For interviews, Dscout simplifies scheduling across time zones, integrates incentives, supports observers, and can capture both a participant's face and screen, and it also offers an AI Moderator that can autonomously guide participants, seek clarification, and capture feedback. On the analysis side, Dscout provides automated transcription, AI-generated summaries of open-ended and video responses, AI-generated themes presented as smart tags for pattern identification, and surfacing of notable moments that highlight strong opinions or surprising insights. Teams can recruit from Dscout's verified Scout participant pool or bring their own audience. Known historically for mobile and in-context research, Dscout positions itself as an AI-native platform that helps researchers capture high-fidelity feedback and move quickly from raw sessions to organized, analyzable insights. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Meeting Transcriber is an open-source, local-first meeting transcriber for macOS, distributed under the MIT license and developed in the open on GitHub (pasrom/meeting-transcriber) with its own product site at meetingtranscriber.app. It runs as a menu bar application that automatically detects and records calls on Teams, Zoom, and Webex, capturing the meeting app's audio and your microphone as separate tracks so that transcription and speaker separation stay clean. Transcription happens fully on-device using one of three selectable speech-recognition engines: WhisperKit (covering 99+ languages), Parakeet TDT v3 (25 European languages with a small, fast model), or Qwen3-ASR (30 languages, requiring macOS 15+). It performs dual-track diarization and can recognize recurring speakers by storing voice embeddings across meetings and matching them with cosine similarity. After a meeting, it can generate a structured Markdown protocol containing a summary, participants, topics discussed, decisions, tasks, open questions, and the full transcript, using either the Claude Code CLI, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Ollama or LM Studio, or a transcript-only mode with no LLM. Because everything runs locally, audio, transcripts, and summaries stay on the user's Mac. It installs via Homebrew Cask and requires macOS 14.2 or later. Pricing varies by plan. Check the official website for current pricing.
Best suited for
Dscout is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium); Meeting Transcriber is a free tier with paid upgrades (freemium). Always confirm current pricing on each vendor's site before buying.
| Feature | Dscout | Meeting Transcriber |
|---|---|---|
| Core capability | Moderated live and uploaded video interviews with observer support | Automatic recording of Teams, Zoom, and Webex meetings via a macOS menu bar app |
| Standout feature | AI Moderator that dynamically guides participants and captures feedback | On-device transcription with selectable engines: WhisperKit, Parakeet TDT v3, or Qwen3-ASR |
| Team usage | Automated transcription of interviews and responses | Dual-track diarization with separate app and microphone tracks for clean speaker separation |
| Integrations | AI-generated summaries of open-ended and video responses | Recurring-speaker recognition using stored voice embeddings matched by cosine similarity |
| Languages & capture | AI-generated themes as smart tags and surfaced notable moments | Structured Markdown protocols (summary, participants, topics, decisions, tasks, open questions, transcript) |
| Best-fit workflow | Diary studies, usability testing, intercepts, and media-rich surveys | Pluggable summarization backends: Claude Code CLI, OpenAI-compatible APIs (Ollama, LM Studio), or transcript-only |
Dscout
Choose Dscout if you need running and transcribing moderated user interviews — strengths include supports many research methods beyond interviews in one platform.
Meeting Transcriber
Choose Meeting Transcriber if you need privacy-conscious professionals who want meeting transcripts and notes kept on their own mac — strengths include fully open source under the mit license with development in the open on github.
Dscout
Meeting Transcriber
It depends on your workflow. Dscout is strong for running and transcribing moderated user interviews, while Meeting Transcriber is strong for privacy-conscious professionals who want meeting transcripts and notes kept on their own mac. Both transcribe and summarize meetings.
Dscout is a free tier with paid upgrades and Meeting Transcriber 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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