Alternatives
You searched for an alternative to a bot-based notetaker. The honest answer is that Whisply is not one. It is a different category. Here are the real alternatives, and where Whisply fits.
Fireflies.ai joins your call as a bot and ships you a recap after. Whisply runs on your Mac, helps you live during the call, and never joins as a participant.
Whisply is a Mac-only menu bar overlay that summons in under 200ms with Cmd+Return, runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later (Apple Silicon and Intel), and stays out of screen sharing and screen recording frames at the system level.
Fireflies.ai built a solid bot-based notetaker. It joins Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams as a participant called something like Fred or Notetaker, records the call, transcribes it, and emails everyone a summary after. For teams who want a searchable archive of every meeting, it does the job.
The reasons people go looking for something else tend to repeat. A client objects to a third party on the call. Legal asks why a transcript of a board conversation is sitting on a SaaS server in another region. A sales rep realises the recap arrives an hour after the deal already closed or died. Pricing creeps up once you add seats, storage, and the AI add-ons. And the help, when it comes, is always retrospective. The decision was already made.
There is also the room dynamic. The moment a bot shows up in the participant list, people get guarded. They stop floating half-formed ideas. They start performing for the transcript. The tool meant to capture the conversation quietly degrades it.
Whisply does not try to be a better Fireflies. It is a Mac-native real-time AI overlay. It lives in your menu bar, summons with Cmd+Return, and answers you in the second you need it. It does not dial into your call. It does not appear as a participant. No one else in the meeting sees a bot, because there is no bot to see.
The work happens on your machine. Whisply listens through your own microphone and looks at your screen with the permissions you grant. The other people in the meeting are not being recorded by a third party they never agreed to. You get the help. They get a normal conversation.
The other practical difference is timing. Fireflies hands you a summary tomorrow. Whisply hands you the answer right now. A figure you half-remember, a sharper way to phrase your point, a question that moves the negotiation forward. The recap matters. The moment matters more.
If you genuinely want a meeting archive with bot-based recording and team-wide search, Fireflies or one of the tools below is probably still the right pick. Whisply solves a different problem. We want to be honest about that.
Whisply runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. It asks for Screen Recording so it can see what you see, Microphone so it can hear the call, and Accessibility (on Pro Undetected) so it can move the cursor and type when you ask it to. Nothing else.
The overlay stays out of screen sharing and screen recording at the system level. If you share your screen on Zoom or Meet, the Whisply window does not appear in the shared frame. The other side sees your slides. You see your slides plus a quiet assistant.
Models are included. You do not bring your own OpenAI key, you do not get a usage bill from a transcription vendor, and you do not need a separate seat for a notetaker bot. Free has limited daily messages and the core meeting-assist features. Pro is 19.99 a month or 11.99 a month annual. Pro Undetected is 149.99 a month or 44.99 a month annual and adds Computer Use plus the proctor-resistant mode.
Pick Fireflies if your workflow is: every meeting recorded, every transcript searched, every CRM auto-updated, every recap sent to the team. That is a real and legitimate use case, and bot-based tools do it well.
Pick Whisply if you want help during the conversation rather than after it, if the people on the other end of your calls would object to a bot, or if you want the work to happen on your own Mac instead of a vendor cloud. Whisply is built for interviews, sales calls, customer conversations, technical screens, and the high-stakes moments where the recap is not what you need.
You can also run both. Some users keep a bot-based notetaker for internal team meetings and use Whisply for any call where a stranger might object to a third party in the room. The two tools do not overlap as much as the search query suggests.
Grab the build from /download. It runs on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel. The installer is signed and notarised. You will not need to right-click around Gatekeeper warnings.
Screen Recording so the overlay can see what you see, and Microphone so it can hear the call. macOS will prompt you the first time. On Pro Undetected you can also grant Accessibility, which is what lets Computer Use mode move the cursor and type for you.
In Fireflies, disable auto-join for your meetings so the Fred bot stops showing up in the participant list. If your team still wants archives of internal meetings, leave it on for those and off for external calls. Whisply does not replace the archive, it replaces the live help.
Start the meeting normally on Zoom, Meet, or Teams. Press Cmd+Return when you want help. Ask a question, paste a chunk of text, or let Whisply read the screen. The overlay stays out of screen sharing and screen recording at the system level, so the other side never sees it.
No, and we want to be straight about that. Fireflies is a bot-based meeting recorder and team transcript archive. Whisply is a real-time on-device AI overlay for your Mac. They overlap on the word meeting and not much else. If your job is to keep a searchable record of every call your team ever had, Fireflies is built for that. If your job is to be sharper in the call itself, Whisply is built for that. Some people use both.
No. Whisply never appears in the participant list. There is no bot, no second login, no email invite, no name like Notetaker in the room. It listens through your own Mac microphone and helps only you. The other people on the call see a normal one-on-one or group meeting with the participants they expect.
Whisply is built around live help, not archives. You can ask it to write up notes from what it heard, save a summary, or pull out action items at the end of the call, and it will. But it is not trying to be your team-wide meeting database. If you need every meeting transcribed, searchable, and pushed into your CRM automatically, a bot-based tool will do that better today.
They will not see anything on their end. The overlay stays out of screen sharing and screen recording at the system level on macOS, so if you share your screen, the Whisply window is not in the frame. There is no participant entry, no recording notice, and no audio cue. The conversation looks and sounds exactly like the one you would have had without it.
Free has limited daily messages and the core meeting-assist features. Pro is 19.99 a month, or 11.99 a month on the annual plan. Pro Undetected is 149.99 a month, or 44.99 a month annual, and adds Computer Use plus the proctor-resistant mode. Models are included, so there is no separate transcription bill and no API key to bring. Fireflies starts free, with paid tiers around 10 and 19 dollars per seat per month, plus add-ons.
No. Whisply is Mac-only by design. It is built on macOS 13 Ventura or later, on Apple Silicon and Intel, and uses native macOS APIs for the overlay, hotkey, and screen capture behaviour. There is no Windows build, no web app, and no Chrome extension on the roadmap right now.
Yes, and a lot of people do exactly that. Keep Fireflies on internal team meetings where everyone consents to the recording, and use Whisply on external calls where a third party in the participant list would be awkward or unwelcome. The two tools do not conflict.
Mac only. macOS 13 or later. No bot in your calls.
