Should you use Kanary or Otter.ai?

This is the fork everything else follows from. Otter.ai puts recordings in an account: any teammate can search across meetings from a browser on any operating system, permissions are managed centrally, and the transcript is reachable when your laptop is shut.

Kanary stores recordings on the Mac that made them, syncing between your own Macs over iCloud Drive. There is no shared library and no way to grant a colleague access — not as a missing feature, but as the direct consequence of not uploading anything by default — the only way audio leaves the Mac is iCloud Drive sync you turn on yourself.

If you need the first behaviour, stop reading and use Otter.ai; it is genuinely better at it.

Otter.ai's free plan gives you about 5 hours of transcription a month, and each meeting is transcribed for the first 30 minutes only — an hour-long call loses its second half. Past either limit, you are on a paid seat.

Kanary's free tier does not meter hours at all, because nothing is being processed on someone else's servers — it limits how much of a single recording gets transcribed and summarised (1 hour 15 minutes), and the paid tier removes that limit.

Check the per-meeting cap too: it applies to one continuous call, so for an all-day planning session or a long workshop, transcription stops partway through. Kanary compresses audio in the background as it records, so a three-hour all-hands is an ordinary case, and if the disk starts filling the recording is stopped safely rather than lost.

Some things are not a matter of engineering effort — a cloud service has to upload, process, and return, and that round trip is the product. Because Kanary reads the speaker output directly on the Mac, there is no round trip to wait for.

The same locality is why your own voice never blends into the room: the microphone and the speaker are captured as two separate tracks, so your side and theirs are apart before any model gets involved.

It also reaches conversations a bot cannot. A bot only attends meetings it can be invited to, and the calls that matter most are often the ones nobody sends an invitation for.