Tactiq is a transcription tool for meetings. Its features include highlighting, follow-ups, AI summarization and call analytics. It’s generally a good solution for meetings. However, it has several drawbacks in functionality. That’s why many users wonder if they could switch to a similar tool that doesn’t have such problems. In this article, we’ll review top Tactiq alternatives and provide a side-by-side comparison of Tactic with its best alternative Noty Workplace AI Assistance.

The Importance of Effective Note-Taking and Collaboration in Meetings

Oral communication is probably the most transient form of communication. Similar to music it only exists for a moment and then stays in our memory. The latter, however, is unreliable. Humans inevitably forget and distort the acquired information. 

The estimated pace of data loss is 50% per hour, more or less. As concerns distortion, it’s much more difficult to estimate its levels as they depend on multiple factors. Nonetheless, scientists agree that humans distort information in oral communication to make it easier to disseminate and this phenomenon is massive.

Now think about this. Managers spend up to 50% of their time attending meetings, the ephemeral conversations that are doomed to be forgotten or significantly transformed in our memories. How productive can such work be?

Note-taking is one way to address the issue of forgetting conversations. It helps employees to capture important information and insights essential for their work. However, it’s not enough. Note-taking often shifts focus from what’s being said to the writing process. It’s especially critical for people who cannot do two tasks simultaneously or find it hard to focus at all.

Modern technology offers a solution - meeting transcription with highlight functionality. This category of tools turns transient online conversations into tangible digital texts that can be stored, printed, shared and read over and over. And here’s another important aspect. The content of conversation cannot be diverted by memory errors.

Transcriptions and highlights boost collaboration, another essential part of any meeting. The ability to share the text of the conversation can help you avoid conflicts related to misinterpretation as well as continue your cooperation on the meeting agenda after it’s over.

Now, let’s take a closer look at meeting transcription tools: 

We tested Tactiq and here’s what we found

To write this text, we diligently researched the Tactiq meeting tool. Our research included the feedback from users and our own experience with the solution.

User reviews

User reviews were overall positive. However, some users were unhappy with the following issues:

• Non-intuitive UI.

• Bad transcription accuracy.

• Billing issues.

• Poor customer support (people had to wait for response for several months).

• Free plan offers only 10 transcripts per month.

Our own experience with Tactiq

Overall, we had a somewhat chaotic user experience with Tactiq. While it did its main job - transcribe the call, other functions didn’t work properly. Let’s take a closer look.

Features

The tool has all the basic features in its class: 

• meeting transcription

• highlights

• sharing option (export, copy link or send it via email)

• AI summarization

In addition to this, it has the analysis of the engagement in conversation. After each meeting it demonstrates the percentage of time a person spoke.

Pricing & Plans

Tactiq has three plans:

• Free

• Pro: $12 per user per month

• Team: $24 per user per month

Our Testing

We liked the following features:

• The option to choose the type of highlight (callout, decision, action item, question or highlight).

• The number of integrations.

• The analysis of the engagement in conversation.

What went right in the testing:

• The accuracy was fine.

• The widget demonstrated the transcript in real-time.

• The transcript was sent to the Tactiq application.

What went wrong with the tool during the testing:

The AI summarizations failed (regular summary, action items, follow-up, and the custom prompt). We, actually, attempted it several times on 2 different transcripts, on 2 different days (July 19 and August 11, 2023). The program reported an error in every case. 

Despite the failure, the system counted these attempts as successful and took away the credits. It’s a serious drawback, taking into account that free plans have only 5 credits, pro plan has 10 credits per month, and team plan has 200 credits per month.

User experience 

Here we talk about our user experience apart from the failed summarization:

• The widget moves the meeting screen (as seen on the screenshot below), making it smaller, unless you fold it but then you can’t make highlights. It might be a significant problem for people with small screens or with bad eyesight.

• One of the testers found it hard to decide during the conversation which type of highlight to use, and lost focus as they tried to do it.

• To send a meeting follow-up, we needed to take at least 6 steps: command the AI to generate it, find it on the conversation page, copy it, then open mail service, create a new email and paste it. 

• The Tactiq app automatically opens upon the termination of a conversation which might be disruptive for users.

• Overall transcript page looks a bit messy and it’s hard to find the necessary information or functionality (you’ll need to scroll a lot for highlights or text).

• We couldn’t log out. It sounds like a minor problem until you log in on another person’s computer and then fail to log out. It might result in a serious data leak.

Tactiq Alternatives Overview

There are many Tactiq alternatives on the market. Let’s take a closer look at each alternative. 

Google Meet transcription

This is a native Google tool inbuilt in Google Meet. The main advantage of this tool is that it provides unlimited free transcriptions. It’s a great boost compared to only 10 free transcriptions per month provided by Tactiq. The accuracy of this tool is quite high as it uses the same speech-to-text technology as its captions.

The main disadvantages of the tool are:

• It takes hours for a transcription to be uploaded on your Google Drive

• It doesn’t have essential functionality of any meeting transcription tool like high-lights, AI summarization, and automated follow-ups.

• The folder in which your meeting transcripts are stored automatically erases all files older than three months. So you need to always remember to relocate them to some other place.

Sembly

Sembly is a third-party transcription tool, the alternative to Tactiq. It has many basic features of meeting transcription tools like transcription, highlights (called bookmarks), and AI summarization. In addition to that, it records audio during the calls.

The key advantages of Sembly as a Tactiq alternative are: 

• The UI and UX. The interface is much “cleaner” and it’s easier to use. 

• Lower price. The paid plans include Professional ($10 per user per month) and Team ($20 per user per month). 

• Audio file transcription. You can upload any recording of the meeting and transcribe it using Sembly.

The disadvantages of Sembly:

• Monthly meeting limitation for a free version is 4 hours.

• No follow-ups.

• The limitation on the storage of meeting history.

• More than two members in a workspace is allowed only in the Team paid plan.

• The tool joins the meetings as participants, so in-call highlights aren’t available. 

• There are delays in joining meetings and transcript upload in the app.

Noty: The Ultimate Tactiq Alternative

Noty AI Workplace Assistant is a third-party tool that transcribes all Google Meet calls for free. It is a new tool that hit the market 2 years ago and has become increasingly popular over the past 6 months.

Noty Overview

The key features of Noty include:

1. Free unlimited meeting transcriptions for all users regardless of subscription.

2. Highlighting and commenting on the dialogues during and after the call.

3. Four types of AI summarization (summary, task, action items, decisions).

4. AI follow-ups in 1 click in Noty app and in Gmail or Calendar using Noty add-on.

5. Unlimited storage of all transcriptions in Noty application + transcript export to Google Docs.

6. Unlimited number of members in a workspace.

7. The ability to share conversations with your team, call participants or other stakeholders.

8. Integrations with Google Meet, Zoom, Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Docs.

Despite Noty being a new tool, the development team has managed to create functionality that enables it to compete with more mature tools. And it is constantly working on improving the solution.

Noty main benefits include:

1. Data loss prevention. In 2023, meeting transcriptions are no longer a luxury. They must be an essential part of your corporate data and should be preserved accordingly. Noty enables your business to do it for free and doesn’t make you choose between the meetings.

2. Performance boost. Noty enables you to save up to 1 hour per meeting on routine things like meeting follow-ups, summarization, task assignment, and preparations. 

3. Seamless work in your virtual workplace. Noty integrates with Google Workspace tools enabling you to seamlessly work in its main services.

Noty vs. Tactiq: Feature Comparison

Overall, Noty and Tactiq have a similar feature set: transcripts, highlights, AI summarization, and conversation sharing. Both tools have Google Meet widget, Chrome extension and Calendar integrations. Now let’s talk about the advantages of tools.

Tactiq advantages over Noty:

• More integrations.

• Ability to create AI kits and custom summaries

• Tactiq has one feature that Noty lacks - the engagement analysis.

• The highlight types.

Noty advantages over Tactiq:

• Free unlimited transcriptions of Google Meet calls for all users

• Lower prices for paid plans ($8.99 and $14.99)

• No credit system: users can AI-summarize all meetings in paid plans

• The ability to generate and send follow-ups right in the app.

• Gmail and Calendar addon for generating meeting follow-ups

• Integration with Google Docs and ability to export transcripts there

• The semi-transparent widget that doesn’t take space from the meeting screen

• A more convenient UX (no need to scroll through the conversation page, better arrangement of conversations).

Overall, Noty seems to be a better choice for users that want to stay on free plan and for those who want to have a paid version with AI summarization and more collaboration opportunities. 

Try Noty

Choosing the Right Tactiq Alternative

Tactiq testing that we did recently, showed that despite a good set of features this application limits the users abilities to work on their meetings. Another important thing that we detected is the lingering problems with summarization that we found in the Tactiq app and that haven’t been fixed in almost a month. Coupled with the reported support issues and the absence of log-out functionality, it’s no wonder people would be looking for a Tactiq alternative.

When looking for a meeting subscription tool we suggest assessing the following aspects:

• Transcription limitations

• AI summarization limitations

• The availability of follow-up feature

• Storage limitations

• Team limitations

• The availability of a widget

• The time lagging between the end of the call and the appearance of the script

• The quality of transcription and AI summarization

• The integration with your tech-stack.

These are critical aspects of the work related to meetings. They will impact directly on your performance quality.

We suggest Noty as the best alternative to Tactiq. This tool was developed based on a profound analysis of all the advantages and disadvantages of the legacy meeting transcription solutions. Most importantly it provides unlimited meeting transcriptions for all users and AI summarization for unlimited number of calls for paid subscribers. Noty can boost your productivity and help you achieve your business goals.

Try Noty