Which live transcription app follows the lecture you are sitting in?

Two more worth knowing

Notta is a cloud notetaker with genuine live translation on web and mobile, and the thing to check is the counter rather than the price. Its help centre states that monolingual real-time translation is "Available on all plans" with a "Usage Limit: 2 free uses per month", and bilingual transcription and translation with four; the pricing page repeats those caps for Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise alike, and lifting them needs a paid plan plus a paid add-on. In US dollars on 17 September 2026 the plans are Free at USD 0, with 120 transcription minutes a month, three minutes per conversation and no export; Pro at USD 8.17 a month billed annually; Business at USD 16.67. Notta advertises "98%+ Accuracy Guaranteed" on its homepage while its own help centre publishes 90% or higher for formal meetings and around 50% to 80% for casual ones. Data sits in Amazon Web Services in Tokyo, with no EU residency option published, and the mobile app cannot transcribe offline at all. Otter, the other notetaker people ask about here, has its own page: Koine Live Pro vs Otter.

Plaud is the hardware answer: a small recorder, a card or a pin, at USD 159 for the Note and USD 189 for the Note Pro, with a subscription that starts free at 300 transcription minutes a month and runs to USD 17.99 a month for Pro and USD 29.99 for Unlimited. It transcribes 112 or more languages, one per recording, on its own microphone and its own storage. For the room you are sitting in it is the wrong shape, and Plaud says so itself: "No, Plaud does not support real-time transcription", and "No - Plaud doesn't currently support translation between languages." Nothing is readable while the talk is happening. What it does well is everything after, and its data handling is documented in detail: EU and EEA accounts sit in Amazon Web Services in Frankfurt, with ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and SOC 2 Type II published. Both checked 17 September 2026.

When one of these is the better choice

For most people in most rooms the free option is the right one, and it is already on the phone. If the lecture is in a language you read, Google Live Transcribe or Apple Live Captions puts the words on screen for nothing, with no account and no subscription. Live Transcribe in particular carries what an accessibility team builds and a notetaking app does not: external microphone support, custom words for names and terms, a vibration when your name is spoken, labels for non-speech sounds, and sign language to text.

If you need translation rather than transcription, try Google Translate's Transcribe mode before paying for anything. Google describes it as translating one person speaking at length in near real time, and its Play listing itemises it at eight languages, named in Google's launch post as English, French, German, Hindi, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai, in any combination. Google publishes 73 for its bilingual live translate mode, so eight is narrow. But if your lecture is in one of the eight it costs nothing, and Google is straight about the conditions: a quiet room, one person speaking at a time.

Privacy is the second reason to choose a free one, and Apple's material is explicit about it: Live Captions are "generated on device", Live Translation "runs entirely on device", and with languages downloaded the Translate app works with no connection at all. If your requirement is that the audio never leaves the phone, Apple's material says something Koine's cannot, because Koine translates on its servers. The counterpart, in Apple's own words: when both languages are not downloaded the work moves to Apple's servers and transcripts are kept for two years, a subset reviewed.

When Koine Live Pro is

Koine Live Pro exists for the case the free apps do not cover: the speaker's language is not yours, the talk runs for an hour, and you want to follow it now rather than read a translation tonight. The translation arrives in your language while the sentence is still being finished, about a second and a half behind, in up to 70 languages and up to three at a time. You can leave it in the original to practise and switch when you lose the thread.

What happens afterwards is the other half. Every session lands in a private history with your highlights, notes and photos, and Koine Plus, which Live Pro includes, answers questions about what was said, writes summaries and makes study cards from it. None of the four products in the table publishes anything like that; Notta and Plaud do.

Two smaller things follow. Recording is a separate switch, off by default, so a session can keep the words and no audio, which matters in a classroom or a church. The relay and the account live in the EU, in Amsterdam and Stockholm, with OpenAI's speech and translation the one part still running outside the EU today and EU processing scheduled.

What the table cannot show

We rate nobody's accuracy here, our own included. Google, Apple and Microsoft publish no accuracy figure for these products at all. The only test worth anything is ten minutes of your own lecturer, in your own room, from the seat you actually sit in.

All of this is machine transcription and machine translation, and all of it is wrong sometimes. Apple states that Live Captions "shouldn't be relied upon in high-risk or emergency situations" and that Live Translation "uses generative models, and outputs may be inaccurate". Koine's own note says the same in plainer words: a tool for following and remembering, not professional interpreting or transcription, and not to be relied on where the consequences are medical, legal or contractual.

Two practical things no table holds. Apple notes that "Live Captions uses additional battery", and anything that listens for ninety minutes will drain a phone, so a charger belongs in the bag; a clip-on microphone helps in a large hall, whichever app you use. And the consent is yours, not the app's. Tell the room you are transcribing before you start.