Buyer's guide

How to choose transcription software for a team

What to check before you buy seats: bots, languages, where the audio goes, how the price caps you, and how you get out. Then test it on your own recordings for two weeks.

Test it on one of my recordings

The short answer

Start from what your team records and where: online calls, meetings in a room, phone interviews, files that already exist. Then check five things most shortlists skip: whether the tool sends a bot into calls, how it handles your languages on your own audio, who processes the data and in which country, how the price caps use (minutes, files, length of one file), and how cancelling and refunds work. Run a two-week pilot on real recordings before anyone signs. SozAI is one option for teams that want transcripts and notes without a bot, in many languages, at $12.99 a month or $99.99 a year per seat; it is the wrong choice today if you need SSO, a SOC 2 report or a shared team workspace.

Start from what gets recorded

The same word, transcription, covers products built for very different jobs. Pick the category first, then compare vendors inside it.

What you record	Category to look at	The trade-off
Video calls, with notes for everyone afterwards	Meeting assistants that add a bot to the call	Least effort per meeting. The price is an extra participant, access to your calendar, and clients who sometimes ask what it is.
Calls you'd rather record from your own computer	Bot-free recorders that capture the call's sound on your machine	Somebody has to press record. Nobody on the other side sees a new participant.
Meetings and interviews in a room	A phone app on the table	Speaker labels and the phone's microphone matter more than any feature list.
A backlog of files	Upload tools	Check the size limit, the length limit for one file, and any cap on files per month.
A court record or a certified transcript	A human transcription service	Slower and priced per minute. AI drafts are working copies, not records.
Patient information in the US	Vendors that sign a BAA	Most general tools, SozAI included, do not sign one.

Twelve criteria, and how SozAI answers each

The right-hand column is our own answer as of October 2026, written so you can check it rather than take it on trust.

Criterion	What to check	SozAI's answer
Languages	Test your own accents. Ask whether you must set the language for each file, and what happens when a speaker switches language mid-sentence.	99 languages, detected per file without a setting. Our published test on short read sentences: word error rate 1.8% in Spanish, 3.6% in English, 8.0% in Portuguese, 19.6% in Arabic, 50% in Kazakh. Mixed-language recordings are not measured.
Speaker labels	Are speakers told apart by voice? Can you rename them, and do the names reach the export?	By voice for files and recordings; on a YouTube link an AI model guesses from the words. Renaming works in the phone app and on the web; Mac and iPad can't rename yet. Every export except SRT carries the names.
Bot or no bot	Is anything added to the call? Does the tool read your calendar or email the participants?	No bot, no calendar access. The web app records a call open in Chrome or Edge; the Mac app records the Mac's sound; phones record the room.
Where data is stored	Ask for the sub-processor list with a country for each, and what each one receives.	Files are stored on our servers in Germany (Hetzner). Speech recognition for files and recordings runs at AssemblyAI in the US. Every company is on our sub-processor list.
Training on your data	Get it in writing, and ask the same of every sub-processor.	Our code never sends recordings into model training. Partners work under their own terms, linked from the sub-processor list. The free tools on sozai.app use free AI models, so keep confidential text out of them.
Deletion and retention	What does deleting remove? How long do backups keep it?	A user deletes a recording or the whole account themselves. That removes it from our servers; encrypted database backups are kept up to 12 months, and the speech recognition partner's copy is not removed. Each account can have audio deleted automatically, 30 days after transcription or right after it.
Exports	Formats, speaker names in them, export of many files at once. Leaving should be cheap.	Apps: PDF, TXT, SRT, VTT, JSON. Web: TXT (timecodes and speakers optional), SRT and VTT, plus one TXT for many recordings at once. No Word export.
Platforms	Where people actually record: phone, laptop, browser on a locked-down work computer.	Phones and tablets (iPhone, iPad, Android), Mac, the web app, Chrome extensions. One account for all of them.
Pricing model and caps	Per minute or per seat? Monthly minute caps, file counts, length of one file. Read the fine print of plans sold as having no limit.	Per seat. Up to 700 hours of transcription per seat; files up to 500 MB; one web recording up to 3 hours. Meetings recorded in the Mac app are transcribed on the Mac and don't use minutes.
Cancelling and refunds	Trials that convert into a charge, renewal reminders, the refund window.	No trial that converts: 30 free minutes once per account, no card. Cancel any time and keep Premium to the end of the paid period. Web refunds follow the refund policy.
Admin features	Shared workspace, roles, provisioning, audit log, sign-in through your identity provider.	One manager buys seats and invites people. No shared workspace or roles. No SSO or SCIM. No audit log.
Certifications	Ask for the report itself, and whose it is: the vendor's, or its hosting provider's.	No SOC 2 report, no HIPAA BAA. Hetzner's data centers are ISO/IEC 27001 certified; the certificate is Hetzner's, not ours.

Bots versus recording it yourself

This is the choice that decides most of the rest, and reviews of meeting tools return to it more than to anything else.

	A bot in the call (bots such as Otter, Fireflies, Fathom, Read)	Recording from your own device
Effort per meeting	None once the calendar is connected	Someone presses record
What other participants see	An extra participant with a name	Nothing new in the call; you tell them you're recording
Access it needs	Your calendar, often your meeting links	Your microphone, and the call's sound on your computer
Who gets the notes	Depends on the tool; some email every attendee	Whoever you send them to
Meetings in a room	A bot can't hear the room; you need a separate recorder	The same app, on a phone

Neither option settles consent. Whichever you choose, tell the people on the call that it's recorded and follow the recording law where you and they are.

Questions to send every vendor

Which companies receive our audio or transcripts? In which countries, and for what?
Do you or any of them train models on our data? Where is that written?
When a user deletes a recording, which copies are removed, and how long do backups keep it?
What exactly caps our use? Minutes, number of files, the length of one file, daily limits?
What happens at renewal? Do you send a reminder, and what is the refund window?
Can we export everything, with speaker names, in a format our other tools read?
Does anything join our calls or email our participants?
Which security reports can you send us, and whose reports are they?
Who is the seller on our invoice, and can it carry our tax ID?
How do we reach a person in support, and how fast do they answer?

A two-week pilot

A pilot exists to find the recordings that break the tool, so collect the hard ones on purpose.

Pick three to five people who record different things. One should be the person who complains most.
Gather ten real recordings: a noisy room, a strong accent, two languages in one conversation, at least six speakers, a phone interview, the longest file you have.
Run all ten through every tool on the shortlist. Use the free minutes where there are any.
Time the cleanup. Minutes of fixing per hour of audio is the number that tells tools apart; a summary that reads well can still put words in someone's mouth.
Check the speaker labels line by line on the six-speaker file.
Export into the place the text really ends up, a document editor or coding software for example, and see what survives the trip.
Delete a recording and an account. See what the vendor says remains.
Read an invoice, then cancel a subscription and note how many steps it took.
Ask support one real question and time the reply.
Score each tool on cleanup time and labels first, then on export and the answers to the vendor questions. Price comes last, because a cheap tool that doubles cleanup time is the expensive one.

With SozAI, every person on the pilot can use the 30 free minutes on their own account, so the pilot itself costs nothing. Buying seats afterwards is described in how to buy SozAI for a team.

When SozAI is not the right choice

Pick something else if your security review requires a SOC 2 report or single sign-on. There's no audit log either. Pick something else if a manager must see every recording in one shared library, or if you want notes from every calendar meeting without anyone pressing record. Patient data needs a vendor that signs a BAA. A court record needs a human transcription service.

SozAI fits a team whose people record their own interviews and meetings in many languages and want no bot in their calls. How that looks for newsrooms, research teams and consultants is on separate pages, and the overview is on SozAI for teams. The details behind the right-hand column are on our security page.

Updated October 27, 2026By Merey Tleugazin

What is the best way to choose transcription software for a company?

Decide first what you record and where, then test the shortlisted tools on ten of your own recordings for two weeks. Score them on cleanup time per hour of audio and on speaker labels, then on the vendor's answers about data. Look at price last.

Is a meeting bot or a bot-free recorder better for a team?

It depends on who is in your calls. A bot takes no effort per meeting but appears as a participant and needs your calendar; a bot-free recorder needs someone to press record and adds nothing to the call, which clients usually prefer.

Does SozAI have a SOC 2 report or SSO?

No. SozAI has no SOC 2 report and no single sign-on; sign-in is with a Google or Apple account, or with a one-time email code. The servers are at Hetzner in Germany, whose data centers are ISO/IEC 27001 certified, a certificate that is Hetzner's, not ours.

What questions should I ask a transcription vendor about data?

Ask which companies receive your audio and in which countries, whether any of them trains models on it, and which copies are removed when a user deletes a recording. Ask how long backups keep deleted data, too.

How long should a transcription software pilot take?

Two weeks is enough for three to five people and about ten hard recordings. That's enough to cover the hard cases (noise, accents, many speakers) and one cancellation test.

Is SozAI HIPAA compliant?

No. SozAI does not sign a BAA, so it should not be used for patient information in the US. It suits interviews and business meetings.

How long can a recording or a file be in SozAI?

An uploaded file can be up to 500 MB, and one recording made in the web app stops by itself at 3 hours. Each seat includes up to 700 hours of transcription.

Turn your next recording into text

Record, upload a file or paste a link. You get the transcript, speakers and a summary back.