LokalBot
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Otter is one of the best-known AI notetakers: its assistant joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, transcribes in the cloud, and shares notes with your team. That reach comes with a participant in your call and your conversations on Otter's servers. LokalBot takes the opposite approach: it captures the call from your computer's own audio, transcribes and summarizes locally, and needs no account.
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Side by side
| Feature | LokalBot | Otter.ai |
|---|---|---|
| How it captures a meeting | Microphone + system audio on your computer (just the selected app on Mac; on Windows and Linux, where it can be separated); source labels do not identify speakers | The Otter assistant joins Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet; its apps can also record directly |
| Where transcription runs | On your computer — Qwen3-ASR by default, with Parakeet and Whisper as alternatives, plus Granite Speech on Mac | Otter's cloud |
| Account required | None | Yes |
| Works offline | After a one-time model download | Needs a connection |
| Transcription languages | On Mac: 52 languages and dialects with the default model; 99 with Whisper | English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese |
| Free plan limits | None — the whole app is free | 300 transcription minutes per month |
| Team features | Single-user; share by exporting Markdown | Shared notes, team workspaces, and integrations |
| Connect AI tools | Read-only CLI and MCP server, off until you enable Agent Access | Otter MCP server |
| System-wide dictation | Hold ⌥ Space (Alt+Space on Windows and Linux) in any app | No |
| Day timeline | App and window activity by default; screen text and encrypted screenshots are opt-in and deleted after 14 days | No |
| Source code | Open source, GPLv3 | Proprietary |
| Price | Free | Basic free · Pro $16.99/mo, or $8.33/mo billed annually · Business $30/mo, or $19.99/mo billed annually · Enterprise custom |
| Platforms | macOS 15+ on Apple Silicon; Windows 10/11 x64 and Linux x86_64 in alpha | Web, Mac and Windows apps, iOS, Android, and a Chrome extension |
Verdict
The cloud notetaker most teams already know.
For conversations that shouldn't live on someone else's server.
Questions
No. Nothing joins the call and nothing appears in the participant list. LokalBot records your microphone and your computer's system audio, so it works with Zoom, Teams, Meet, Slack huddles, or any app that plays sound. You're still responsible for telling participants you're recording.
For most meetings, yes — but test it on your own audio. LokalBot defaults to Qwen3-ASR and lets you switch to Parakeet or Whisper in Settings, or to Granite Speech on Mac. The benchmarks page shows speed and error rates, measured on a Mac, for the models the project has tested.
There is no tier. LokalBot is free and open source under GPLv3, with no minute caps, no account, and no subscription.
Download
Free and open source. Models download on first use; built-in inference then works offline.
Download for macOSApple Silicon · macOS 15+ · brew install --cask stevyhacker/tap/lokalbot
macOS · Windows · Linux (alpha) · requirements · all releases and notes
Otter and Otter.ai are trademarks of their owner; LokalBot is not affiliated with or endorsed by it. Details are based on public pages and pricing as of October 2026 and may change — if something here is wrong or out of date, open an issue and we'll fix it.