Interview vs Otter and Fireflies: where the audio goes.
Otter and Fireflies are good products, and if you want a bot in your Zoom calls and a shared workspace for the team, they are the right choice. Interview is for the other case: a conversation that must not leave the phone. Here is the plain comparison.
Side by side
| Interview | Otter | Fireflies | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where the audio is processed | On your phone | Otter's servers | Fireflies' servers |
| Where the transcript is stored | On your phone | Otter's cloud | Fireflies' cloud |
| Account required | No | Yes | Yes |
| Works with no connection | Yes, entirely | No | No |
| Price | Free download, $19.99 once | Free tier, then a monthly subscription | Free tier, then a monthly subscription |
| Speaker labels | Yes, and marks a turn Unknown rather than guess | Yes | Yes |
| Remembers a named voice across recordings | Yes, on the phone, deletable | Speaker tagging in the cloud | Speaker tagging in the cloud |
| Joins Zoom, Meet or Teams as a bot | No | Yes | Yes |
| Live transcript during the call | No, after the recording | Yes | Yes |
| Team workspace and sharing | No, you share files | Yes | Yes |
| Import existing audio and video | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Export | Text, Markdown, Word, with or without audio | Text, Word, PDF, SRT and more | Text, Word, PDF, SRT and more |
What Otter and Fireflies do better
They join a meeting as a participant and transcribe live, so notes exist before the call ends. They keep every transcript in a searchable cloud workspace that a whole team can use from any device. They integrate with calendars and CRMs. If your conversations are ordinary meetings and the convenience is worth the cloud, they are excellent at it.
What Interview does that they cannot
It produces a speaker-labeled transcript without sending a single byte anywhere. There is no account, no server, and no company holding a copy. That is the whole product. It matters when the conversation is privileged, off the record, under a consent form, or confidential by law. It also means it works with no connection at all, and that the price is a one-time unlock rather than a subscription.
How to choose
Ask where the audio is allowed to go. If the answer is "anywhere convenient", use Otter or Fireflies. If the answer is "nowhere", use Interview.