Thanks for the tip, Kasper. I just checked out Goodtape. With its strict privacy policy and server in the EU it seems like a valuable option especially for Europeans.
Ulrike’s field guide is the first side-by-side I’ve seen that weighs context as heavily as raw accuracy. Her matrix—speaker separation, accent robustness, noise handling—maps neatly to real-world pain points instead of marketing bullets.
One micro-addition I’d throw into the stack: if your workflow ends in visual assets (slides, social cards, promo posters), run the final transcript screenshot through https://invert-colors.com/ to create a high-contrast negative. It’s free, browser-only, and the flipped palette often makes dense text easier to scan or brand with dark-mode graphics. Takes ten seconds and saves another tool hop.
Interesting… the Voicememo app on my iPhone has been pretty good. And I can upload audio files to ChatGPT or Claude to get summaries, action items, etc. Not sure I see the the benefit in using one of these other options…
As a career change coach, I am extremely happy with the lowest paid tier of Fireflies for capturing both the facts and sentiment of my coaching sessions. It provides a good summary and lists of tasks, with assignments.
Agree with Paul, I'm now using Granola. I find it to be superb. Integrates with Google calendar only for now, however, and it's super how it just kicks off online meetings automatically. Haven't tried Goodtape yet, might give it a try.
Goodtape is a great find thank you Kasper, and the sandboxed options are excellent thank you. Great comparison, but I would demure from putting anything sensitive (research participant material such as interviews) in most of these commercial products (excepting maybe Sonix). On my reading most of the terms of reference, suggest they retain the right to use and train on the data and, given it is the wild west, there seems to be nothing to stop them selling the aggregate data, particularly if they are sold. That's to say nothing of data sovereignty concerns that they will often take the data to another geographic location that puts your data under another country's legal regime. I'm amazed that professionals like doctors and lawyers are using them with intensely private client data. I've seen doctors celebrating using NABLA, which specifically trains and retains all the data they upload for analysis.
Good advice Ulrike. I wasn't familiar with Notta and Sonix and they seem quite interesting. Thanks for bringing them up.
*Here are a few alternatives for those with little or no transcription budget:
https://goodtools.substack.com/p/free-transcription-tools-gt31
Thanks for the tip, Kasper. I just checked out Goodtape. With its strict privacy policy and server in the EU it seems like a valuable option especially for Europeans.
nearly tried all of these tools. Something that really should be in this list is Granola.ai.
After trying that, I stopped with all others.
Ulrike’s field guide is the first side-by-side I’ve seen that weighs context as heavily as raw accuracy. Her matrix—speaker separation, accent robustness, noise handling—maps neatly to real-world pain points instead of marketing bullets.
One micro-addition I’d throw into the stack: if your workflow ends in visual assets (slides, social cards, promo posters), run the final transcript screenshot through https://invert-colors.com/ to create a high-contrast negative. It’s free, browser-only, and the flipped palette often makes dense text easier to scan or brand with dark-mode graphics. Takes ten seconds and saves another tool hop.
Interesting… the Voicememo app on my iPhone has been pretty good. And I can upload audio files to ChatGPT or Claude to get summaries, action items, etc. Not sure I see the the benefit in using one of these other options…
Maybe you don't need reliable verbatim transcriptions. But journalists or lawyers do. Then voicememo plus ChatGPT or Claude is not enough.
As a career change coach, I am extremely happy with the lowest paid tier of Fireflies for capturing both the facts and sentiment of my coaching sessions. It provides a good summary and lists of tasks, with assignments.
Agree with Paul, I'm now using Granola. I find it to be superb. Integrates with Google calendar only for now, however, and it's super how it just kicks off online meetings automatically. Haven't tried Goodtape yet, might give it a try.
I’ve tried a few of the ones mentioned but I’m now using granola.ai which is brilliant.
Goodtape is a great find thank you Kasper, and the sandboxed options are excellent thank you. Great comparison, but I would demure from putting anything sensitive (research participant material such as interviews) in most of these commercial products (excepting maybe Sonix). On my reading most of the terms of reference, suggest they retain the right to use and train on the data and, given it is the wild west, there seems to be nothing to stop them selling the aggregate data, particularly if they are sold. That's to say nothing of data sovereignty concerns that they will often take the data to another geographic location that puts your data under another country's legal regime. I'm amazed that professionals like doctors and lawyers are using them with intensely private client data. I've seen doctors celebrating using NABLA, which specifically trains and retains all the data they upload for analysis.
Check out: https://goodtape.io/