Otter.ai Alternative for Mac

Otter made meeting transcription normal — and cloud-default

Otter.ai is probably the app that made meeting transcription mainstream. OtterPilot joins your Zoom and Google Meet calls, captures the audio, and returns a searchable, shareable transcript. It works well. It's also entirely cloud-based: every second of audio leaves your device, runs through Otter's servers, and lives in your Otter account thereafter.

For a lot of teams, that tradeoff was fine when the only alternative was taking notes by hand. But it means every meeting — performance reviews, client calls, legal strategy, medical intake, board discussions, anything said out loud in a working conversation — is transmitted to and stored inside a vendor you may or may not have vetted for the content of those meetings.

Resonant takes the opposite approach. Meeting transcription runs on your Mac, using local speech models. Nothing uploads. There's no bot joining the call. There's no Otter account holding the transcript. You keep the words; nobody else sees them.

Resonant vs Otter.ai: side by side

No bot, no meeting you didn't invite

One of the more awkward parts of using Otter is that OtterPilot joins your meetings as a visible participant. Everyone in the call sees a bot attached. For internal meetings that's tolerable; for client calls, investor conversations, candidate interviews, and sensitive discussions it's often actively counterproductive.

Resonant captures meeting audio on your Mac directly. No extra participant joins the call. Nobody on the other side of the conversation knows anything is being transcribed except what you choose to tell them.

And it's a dictation app too

Otter is fundamentally a meeting transcription tool. Resonant does meetings and live dictation in any app on macOS — Mail, Slack, Notion, Xcode, terminal. Press a hotkey, speak, clean text lands where the cursor is. One tool, two workflows, neither of which touches a server.

Frequently asked questions