Shadow

With Shadow, you can just set it and forget it. It does all the heavy lifting. It detects meetings reliably and does not need manual coercion like some of its alternatives. It runs very reliably as a background process and does not consume many resources. One of its biggest features is its ability to capture screenshots as it records and transcribes, providing additional context. I had not seen this since rewind.ai, which has now been acquired by Meta.

Because of the non-intrusiveness, low price and automatically starting when I begin a meeting.

Price is much better for Shadow than alternatives and I didn't want an agent represented "in the room"

I use both, just to be sure.

It's easy, reasonably priced, works well, and offeres more privacy than competitors

I wanted a bot-free notetaker that could work with multiple languages.

I love how Shadow focuses on the most important aspect of the meeting: that is, in my opinion, the primary goal of Shadow is to guide users to "get things done" by providing various well-planned tools. There are so many apps that categorize themselves as "AI Notetaker", and the main catch of most of them (if not all) is that it can save user's time tremendously by "summarizing only important parts of a meeting", "easily writing meeting notes", "taking notes during a meeting" and "organizing all meetings for easy retrieval later" so that the user can spend more time on "what really matters". I never found value in those apps. Some features, like archiving of all meetings, really are, but summarizing a meeting that I was present at, or automatically taking a note for me without knowing what's important to me .... not so much. Granola, Jamie, Fireflies, Otter, the list of other apps I've tried goes on but their features rarely diverge from what I said above. Their goal is to organize meetings into easily digestible, bite sized information that can be easily retrieved, and nothing more. On the other hand, Shadow focuses on "what needs to be done post-meeting". The "skills", which are actions that can be applied to any meeting after it ends, are clearly designed to provide insight that are specifically important to me. The feature focuses on what "I" should know or need to do so that I can plan next steps accordingly, instead of simply listing all related facts as mentioned during the meeting that may or may not be related to me, sometimes horrendously out of context. Shadow has a strong philosophy in that it somewhat forces you to follow their way of approaching any meeting. Their perspective is reflected in the overall product, some in subtle ways, others not so much. If this design doesn't bother you, I'm sure Shadow will provide you better results.

no bot, custom local modal, custom prompts, automation after recordings

Love this app, in my top 10 always running apps. It's not attached to browser or zoom app but instead it's system wide listener, non invasive and doesn't sit on the meetings as an extra "person". The skills feature is so cool, I can customize various prompts to manipulate the transcript however I want it. I recommend it to all my partners and clients. Thanks Shadow team, keep it up! 🚀