Notta AI vs Hearsy: Meeting Transcription vs Real-Time Dictation

Notta AI is a cloud-based meeting transcription and note-taking platform that records, transcribes, and summarizes meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and in-person conversations in 58 languages.

Notta is designed primarily for meeting workflows. A bot joins your video calls (or you record in-person audio), and Notta produces a transcript with speaker identification, AI-generated summaries, action items, and shareable notes. It integrates with CRMs and productivity tools via Zapier.

Notta supports 58 languages and offers bilingual transcription, which is genuinely useful for multilingual meetings. The platform is available as a web app, desktop app (Mac and Windows), mobile app (iOS and Android), and Chrome extension. It also sells a dedicated hardware device called Notta Memo for in-person recording.

It is important to understand that Notta and Hearsy serve fundamentally different use cases. Notta is a meeting transcription tool: it records lengthy conversations and produces searchable notes after the fact. Hearsy is a real-time dictation tool: you speak, and text appears at your cursor in under 50ms. If you need meeting notes, Notta is purpose-built for that. If you need to dictate text into any app on your Mac, that is what Hearsy does.

Hearsy is a menu-bar dictation app that runs entirely on your Mac. Press a global hotkey from any app, speak, and transcribed text is pasted at your cursor. No internet connection is used during transcription. Audio is processed in local RAM by one of two AI engines: Parakeet TDT for English (under 50ms latency) or Whisper Large V3 for 99 languages. Optional AI cleanup runs locally via Qwen 2.5 by default, with no API call required.

Notta holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, GDPR, and CCPA certifications, which is a strong compliance posture for a cloud service. Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and at rest.

However, by default Notta uses Japanese-language user conversations to train its AI models. There is no opt-out unless you are on the Enterprise plan. This is a meaningful concern for teams discussing sensitive business information, intellectual property, or strategic plans.

For meeting transcription of non-sensitive calls, Notta's compliance certifications are reassuring. For anything confidential, the AI training data usage policy is worth evaluating carefully.

Hearsy processes everything locally on your Mac. No audio leaves your device during transcription, so there is no data handling policy to evaluate.

Notta is not a real-time dictation tool, so direct latency comparison is not meaningful. Notta transcribes recordings after the fact and produces completed transcripts, summaries, and action items — processing time varies by recording length.

Hearsy's Parakeet engine delivers text at your cursor in under 50ms on Apple Silicon. Whisper Large V3 takes 1-2 seconds, still processing locally. The tools serve different workflows: Notta gives you a document after a meeting; Hearsy gives you text as you speak.