An Otter.ai alternative for in-person meetings

What Otter is built for

Scheduled meetings on a platform, with a notetaker that attends them, plus a mature web app for reading and sharing what came out. If your meetings live on a calendar and happen through a screen, it is a well-built answer and this page is not arguing otherwise.

What happens when the meeting is in a room

The advice for in-person capture from software of this kind ends up in the same place: open the app on your phone and set it on the table. That works, and it has three costs that get underrated.

Your phone is occupied and visible, which changes the meeting. The person across the table watches you put a recording phone between you, and the first minute becomes about that. Battery is the second cost, on a day where the phone is also your maps and your calls. And the third is that it only happens when you remembered to set it up before the conversation started — which excludes the corridor, the walk to the car, and the thing said as someone is leaving.

The card version

chit is a card you hold. There is no app to open and no phone to place. Hold the button through the conversation, or — the way most people actually settle on — hold it for thirty seconds afterwards and say what was decided and what you promised.

It records only while held, so it is visibly deliberate and stops when you stop. That is a much easier thing to have in a client room than either a bot or a phone lying face-up on the table.

The output is the same shape as what you would want from a meeting tool: a transcript of each capture, a digest at the end of the day with the decisions and next steps pulled out, and search across everything you have ever captured.

Which one you need

If your meetings are on video, use a tool built for video. If a meaningful share of the conversations that matter happen in rooms, cars, sites and corridors, no amount of software quality reaches them, and hardware is the category that does.

chit one is $129, chit one Pro is $179, and the $9 a month membership carries unlimited transcripts, the digest, search, calendar and mail connections and cloud backup. Free 30-day returns.