Wednesday, 10pm — rewatching Zoom playback for the third time, scrubbing back to hear "tweak it again"
Cold coffee, third cup. I've been through this loop too many times myself.
The wall I hit: these 4 AI assistants each fix different pain points
My friend Ailin does freelance translation. We tested three of these together. She got stuck on multilingual recognition; I got stuck on searching back through old meetings. I only figured this out recently — turns out these 4 assistants aren't even doing the same job.
Fireflies is like a "notes search engine." After a meeting ends, you literally ask it "what line did the client mention budget on?" — 10 seconds, there's your answer. Ailin runs 30 client interviews a month and lives on this for lookups.
Otter is all about real-time transcription — it scrolls in the bottom-right corner during meetings, and handles mixed Chinese-English decently.
Notta is the multilingual beast — Chinese/English/Japanese/Korean mixed meetings all work. Ailin ended up using it for her Japan-China clients.
Spinach leans toward meeting follow-up. After meetings it auto-drops action items into Notion, good for teams that finish a meeting and don't know what's next.
Replication cost today: money, time, barrier, first step
Money: Fireflies free tier is enough; paid is $10/mo. Otter free gives 300 min/month, paid $16.99/mo. Notta free is 120 min/month. Spinach starts at $12/mo.
Time: 5 min to sign up, 10 min to authorize calendar/Zoom, see results by your next meeting.
Barrier: just install a browser extension. No code, no technical interfaces.
First step: go to Otter.ai, sign up with email, authorize Google Calendar. Next meeting it'll auto-pop up to record and transcribe — literally the one move.
For three types of people, here's how I'd suggest
Just starting (no clients yet, no team): skip it for now. Use phone recorder + WeChat voice-to-text to save money. Once you're doing more than 5 meetings a month, then think about Otter's free tier.
Got 1-2 regular clients: if you need to look back weekly at "what did the client say before," I'd go straight to Fireflies — the search experience is genuinely good.
Scaling up (multi-person collaboration): if your team forgets action items after every meeting, Spinach's Notion integration is worth trying. But confirm your team's OK with English meetings first — it's strongest in English.
Last thing: this tool isn't for everyone. But if you find yourself spending 3+ hours a week untangling notes — it was built for you.