A tl;dv alternative for people who want notes, not video

Video is the whole premise, and the whole cost

tl;dv's bot joins your call and captures audio and video together, producing a synchronised transcript you can scrub through and clip from. Free covers a lot on paper, with limits of 40 recordings a week and three hours per meeting. Pro is $18 per user per month billed annually, $29 monthly. Business, which is where CRM sync, coaching and playbook tracking live, is $59 per user per month annually and $98 monthly.

Video is why the pricing looks like that. Storing and streaming recorded calls is expensive, and you are paying for it whether or not you ever open one.

So the first question is honest and slightly uncomfortable: in the last three months, how many meeting videos have you actually watched back or sent to someone? For a sales team running deal reviews, the answer is a real number. For most other people it is zero, and they are on a video plan because that is what the category sells.

tl;dv pricing and limits checked July 2026 against public pricing pages. Vendors change plans often - verify before you decide.

What TNN does instead

TNN records audio and transcribes it locally on your Mac, without uploading the audio. Each meeting becomes one plain Markdown file with your live notes and transcript. To create an AI Note, choose a mode, select Generate with Claude, then send the prepared prompt in Claude Desktop. Claude reads the selected meeting through MCP and saves the result; Anthropic processes the text through your Claude account.

No bot joins, because TNN captures the audio your Mac is already playing. Nothing appears in the participant list, and it works the same on Zoom, Meet, Teams, a Slack huddle, a phone call on speaker, or a conversation in the room.

Then the part that is hard to get from a cloud video tool: because your meetings are plain files, TNN exposes them to Claude over MCP. For the selected meeting, Claude reads the transcript through MCP and saves an AI Note in the mode you chose after you send the prepared prompt in Claude Desktop. Anthropic processes the meeting text Claude reads through your account.

tl;dv optimises for rewatching the meeting. TNN optimises for never needing to.

The privacy difference is not abstract here

A cloud tool that records video of your calls is holding a considerably more sensitive asset than one holding text. Faces, screen shares, whatever was visible in someone's browser or on someone's wall.

If your meetings include candidate interviews, compensation discussions, incidents that have not been disclosed, or clients whose NDA enumerates subprocessors, a local audio-to-text tool is a materially easier thing to defend. TNN keeps recordings and transcripts on your Mac unless you choose Generate with Claude and send the prepared prompt in Claude Desktop; then the selected meeting text is processed by Anthropic through your account.

Where tl;dv is clearly the better choice

• You share clips. Timestamped video snippets sent to colleagues or customers. TNN cannot do this at all.
• You need CRM sync, coaching or playbook tracking. That is what Business tier buys and TNN has no equivalent.
• Your team is mixed-platform. A bot does not care what anyone runs. TNN needs macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon.
• You need calls recorded without you present. A bot can attend alone. Nothing local can.
• You want a finished product. TNN is in beta.

Trying it

Download, grant the screen and microphone permissions, connect your calendar so TNN knows which meeting is starting, press record. The transcription model downloads once, about 600 MB, and after that everything works offline. Language detection is automatic.