Narada vs Zoom AI Companion — the notetaker you already pay for, and the one that covers everything else
One is a feature of somebody’s Zoom account. The other is a feature of your Mac. That single difference decides most of the rest, including the meetings each one simply cannot see.
- Zoom’s own knowledge base is unambiguous about who controls the meeting summary — “Only the meeting host and co-host can start or stop the Meeting summary through the in-meeting controls.” A guest cannot start one.
- Zoom’s My Notes does capture device audio with “no bots required” and reaches Teams, Meet and in-person conversations — but in-person transcription is capped at 3 uses per month even on the $8.33/user/month tier, and the notes are stored in Zoom’s cloud.
- Narada records your Mac’s microphone and system output as two separate local files and transcribes them on-device with Parakeet TDT v3 in 25 European languages. The audio never leaves the machine in any mode.
- Zoom lists 32 languages for AI meeting summaries. Narada’s transcription covers 25 European languages with word error rates from 4.0% (Italian) to 36.9% (Greek) on the model vendor’s own FLEURS benchmark, so accuracy is not uniform.
- Narada’s free tier is a complete recorder — calendar-aware capture, on-device transcription, speaker separation, plain files. Zoom’s free My Notes Basic allows “AI note taking (3 uses per month)" and “40 minutes per meeting”.
If your whole company is on a paid Zoom Workplace plan and the host always turns the summary on, use Zoom’s. It is included in what you already buy, there is nothing to install, and Zoom’s own page for Workplace Pro puts it plainly: “AI Companion is included at no additional cost with the paid services in your Zoom user account.” Narada exists for the other case — meetings you do not host, calls on platforms your licence does not reach, and an archive you want sitting in a folder you own.
One naming note before anything else, because Zoom re-tiered its AI in 2026 and three names are live on Zoom’s pages at once. AI Companion is the set of features bundled into paid Zoom Workplace plans. My Notes is the notetaker, sold standalone as well as bundled. ZoomMate is a newer agentic tier at "$20 per user per month with included AI credits”, and Zoom’s launch statement says it is “available today for online and direct customers in North America”, with EMEA and APAC “expected to roll out later this year”.
Who each one is for
Zoom AI Companion is for people whose meetings are Zoom meetings, on an account somebody manages. The value comes from being already there: notes land in Zoom Hub next to the recording, admins can set policy across the org, and 32 languages are covered for AI summaries — a wider list than most standalone tools publish. If you host most of your calls and your IT admin has the features switched on, you are already paying for a competent notetaker.
Narada is for a person with a Mac and a mixed calendar. It records the Mac’s microphone and the Mac’s system output as two separate files, transcribes both on-device, and writes plain .m4a, .txt, .md and .json files into a folder you pick. It does not join calls, it does not appear in the participant list, and it does not care which app is making the sound. It needs macOS 15.6 or later. It has no team features, no admin console, no shared workspace and no CRM integrations — if those matter to you, this is the wrong tool and the rest of this page will not change that.
The difference that actually matters
Zoom’s notetaker is a property of an account. Narada’s is a property of your machine.
That sounds abstract until you count the gates. For Zoom’s Meeting Summary, the admin decides first — “Account owners and admins can choose to enable or disable AI features for all users on the account or specific groups of users” — and then the host decides: “Only the meeting host and co-host can start or stop the Meeting summary through the in-meeting controls.” If you are a guest on a client’s call, you get nothing. Zoom is explicit even about the output: “Unauthenticated users will not receive an email summary, as no email address was associated with their presence in the meeting”, and “Participants joining the meeting ad hoc… will not receive the summary, as they were not on the original invitee list.”
The pattern generalises to the other platforms, and gets worse. Microsoft’s own support page for Teams recap: “People in your org can access an event’s intelligent recap if they were invited to the event. Anyone who wasn’t invited or isn’t in your org won’t have access.” Google’s launch post for Meet note-taking: “you can use the feature now for meetings that you host.” Built-in notetakers are built for the host.
Zoom is the one platform vendor that partly escapes this, and the honest version of this page has to say so. My Notes captures device audio. Zoom’s feature page: “Automatically take notes across Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and other third-party meeting platforms — no bots required.” The mechanism is the same class of thing Narada does — Zoom’s KB says “the transcription uses the system and microphone audio on the device”. So the architectural argument is not Narada’s alone. What differs is where the result goes, whether a host can still switch it off for you, and how hard the caps bite.
Side by side
| Zoom AI Companion / My Notes | Narada | |
|---|---|---|
| What it captures | Zoom’s own meeting stream; My Notes uses “the system and microphone audio on the device” | Mac microphone and Mac system output, as two separate files |
| Bot joins the call | Yes for third-party meetings via AI Companion (“will join the meeting as a participant”, Zoom branding + owner’s name); no for My Notes | Never. Nothing is invited, nothing appears in the participant list |
| Works when you are a guest | Meeting Summary: no, host and co-host only. My Notes: yes, unless the host disables “Transcribe in My Notes” for participants | Yes. Your Mac’s audio is yours to record |
| Admin or host can turn it off | Yes — admin policy, then host controls | No third party has a switch. Your Mac, your setting |
| Zoom + Teams + Meet coverage | AI Companion bot: “Google Meet and Microsoft Teams only”. My Notes: Zoom, Teams, Meet “and other third-party meeting platforms” | Any app that plays audio, because it taps system output |
| In-person conversations | Yes, capped: “Transcribe in-person meetings (3 uses per month)" on My Notes Standard | A microphone-only recording works, but there is no in-person mode and no speaker separation on it |
| Languages for notes | 32 for AI meeting summary, listed by Zoom | 25 European languages for transcription; WER 4.0% (Italian) to 36.9% (Greek) per the model vendor |
| Where the notes live | Zoom’s cloud, “via Zoom Hub or Zoom Canvas” | A folder you choose on your Mac, one subfolder per meeting, unencrypted plain files |
| Does raw audio leave the machine | Yes — it is processed and stored by Zoom | No. In every mode, audio stays local |
| Third parties that see content | Named in Zoom’s blog: “Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity”, under zero-retention contracts | None in Recorder-only or On-device AI mode. In Pro AI and bring-your-own-key, transcript text goes to OpenAI after explicit consent |
| Metering | Meeting notes are unmetered: “meeting summaries, note-taking… are not currently metered and do not consume credits” | No metering. On-device AI has no per-use cost at all |
| Free tier | My Notes Basic: “AI note taking (3 uses per month)", “40 minutes per meeting”, “AI queries (20 per month)" | The whole recorder, including on-device transcription and speaker separation |
| Cheapest paid route to AI notes | $8.33/user/month for My Notes standalone, billed annually | $6.99/month or $69.99/year for Pro AI, 3-day trial — or $0 using On-device AI |
| Requirements | A Zoom account on an eligible plan; admin and host cooperation | macOS 15.6+. On-device AI needs Apple Silicon and 8 GB RAM minimum |
| Team sharing, admin retention, compliance machinery | Yes | No. Single-user app, no team features, no admin console |
Prices and vendor quotes checked 4 August 2026. Zoom's pricing pages render numbers in JavaScript; the figures above come from Zoom's own comparison page, feature pages and press releases, and are geo-dependent.
Where Zoom AI Companion is the better choice
If you host the meetings, stay on Zoom, and your admin has already enabled AI features, Zoom wins on cost and on friction. The notes are next to the recording, everyone invited gets them, and you did not have to install or configure anything. That is a real advantage and no amount of local-first argument dissolves it.
It also wins on language breadth. Zoom lists 32 languages for AI meeting summaries, including Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Thai, Turkish and Vietnamese. Narada’s on-device transcription covers 25 European languages and none of those. If your meetings are in Japanese or Mandarin, Narada cannot transcribe them and Zoom can. Stop reading here.
And it wins for regulated buyers who need something an individual cannot provide. Zoom documents deployment options where, in its words, “Available AI features are powered solely by Zoom-hosted models running on infrastructure managed directly by Zoom” and “Content data used for AI features is processed within Zoom’s infrastructure”. That is a tenant-admin election, backed by contracts, audit trails and retention policy. A sandboxed Mac app has none of that apparatus and should not pretend otherwise.
Where Narada is the better choice
You attend more meetings than you host. Consultants, contractors, salespeople, anyone whose calendar is full of other people’s invites. The gates above are structural: you cannot fix a host’s admin policy, and asking each client to turn on their notetaker is not a workflow.
Your calls are not all on one platform. A Zoom call, then a Teams call on a client’s tenant, then a Meet, then a phone call on speaker, then a webinar you are watching. An audio tap does not distinguish between them. Narada’s calendar integrations cover macOS Calendar, Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, and anything without a calendar entry can be started from the menu bar in one click.
You want the files. Every meeting becomes a dated folder holding the audio, the merged transcript with timestamps, a Markdown summary and a JSON analysis. Deliberately unencrypted, so you can drop them into anything. Nothing is stored in a tenant somebody else administers under a retention policy you did not set.
You want to keep transcripts off the cloud entirely. Narada’s On-device AI mode runs a Gemma 3 model locally through MLX, so summaries and follow-ups are generated with nothing sent anywhere. The honest caveats: it requires Apple Silicon (Intel Macs can record and transcribe but not run this), it is a one-time 3 GB or 7 GB download depending on your RAM, it holds 7–8.4 GB of memory while working, it pauses while a recording is in progress, and Narada’s own settings copy describes it as “lighter quality than the cloud”. It is not equal to the cloud route and the app says so.
One thing Narada does that no platform notetaker does: it checks each recording against itself, comparing the audio frames submitted to the frames actually in the finished file, and marks the meeting Incomplete when they disagree. This exists because audio can be lost — a device stalls, a microphone dies mid-call. Narada tells you rather than presenting a partial recording as a whole one. It does not recover the missing audio.
Privacy and where your audio goes
Both vendors deny training on your content, and any comparison implying otherwise is false. Zoom’s AI whitepaper, verbatim:
“Zoom does not use any customer audio, video, chat, screen sharing, attachments, or other communications-like customer content (such as poll results, whiteboard, and reactions) to train Zoom’s or its third-party artificial intelligence models.”
The interesting part is not training. It is transmission and location. Zoom’s data-residency post names the third-party model providers — “Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity” — and says of the default Federated AI tier that it “Might involve global processing, including the US”. Zoom’s zero-retention arrangement is stated clearly (“Zoom has zero data retention policies in place, which provide that they do not retain customer content, with limited exceptions for trust and safety purposes”), but that is a contractual promise about a third party, not an absence of transmission. Keeping processing in-region means an admin electing a Zoom-Hosted Models tier, which an individual user cannot do.
Narada’s position, in the app’s own words rather than marketing’s: in Recorder-only mode the route summary reads “This Mac only. No AI requests are sent.” In On-device AI mode, nothing is sent after the one-time model download. In Pro AI and bring-your-own-key modes, transcript text and your chat questions go to OpenAI — through Narada’s proxy or directly with your own key — and only after you accept an explicit consent sheet. Pro AI also sends a per-install device identifier and a subscription identifier for billing. Raw audio never leaves the Mac in any mode, and transcription itself runs entirely locally through Core ML.
Two things Narada does not claim. Files on disk are deliberately unencrypted, so this is not zero-knowledge storage. And nothing here makes a recording lawful: consent law varies by jurisdiction, Narada shows a reminder on screen for the whole recording, and the responsibility is yours. Say out loud that you are recording.
Pricing, plainly
Zoom (checked 4 August 2026, from Zoom’s own pages):
- Core AI features in paid Zoom Workplace plans: “starting at $14.16/user/month”
- My Notes standalone: "$8.33/user/month billed annually”
- ZoomMate: "$20 per user per month with included AI credits”, North America at launch
- AI Productivity Suite: "$10 per user per month with AI credits included”
- Free: My Notes Basic — 3 note-taking uses per month, 3 hosted meeting summaries, 20 AI queries, 40 minutes per meeting
Meeting Summary needs, verbatim, “A Licensed user on a Zoom Workplace Pro, Zoom Workplace Pro Plus, Zoom Workplace Business, Zoom Workplace Business Plus, Zoom Workplace Enterprise, Zoom Workplace Enterprise Plus, or Enterprise Bundle account.”
Narada (checked 4 August 2026): the recorder is free with no account — calendar-aware capture, on-device transcription with speaker separation, labels, notes, favourites, storage management, the Claude Desktop connector. Pro AI is $6.99/month or $69.99/year with a 3-day free trial, and it buys cloud-quality summaries, follow-ups, chat over the archive and pre-meeting briefs. Those same features are also free in On-device AI mode on an Apple Silicon Mac.
For the other two platforms, briefly: Teams intelligent recap has no free tier and needs a Microsoft 365 subscription plus a Teams Premium licence at "$10.00 user/month, paid yearly” or Microsoft 365 Copilot at "$21.00 user/month, paid yearly”. Google Meet note-taking is bundled into Business Standard at "$14 / user per month” and up — Business Starter at $7 does not qualify — and covers 8 languages, one per meeting.
How to try both
There is no migration to do, because they do not conflict. Run Zoom’s notetaker on the calls you host and let Narada catch the rest for a couple of weeks, then look at what each one actually captured.
- Ask your Zoom admin whether AI features are enabled for your account, and check the Meeting Summary toggle on your next hosted call.
- Install Narada from the Mac App Store, grant Microphone and System Audio Recording — not Screen Recording, which it does not use — and pick a folder for the archive.
- Leave the default “Ask before recording” on for the first week so you can see when it would have started. Switch to automatic recording once you trust the calendar rules.
- After two weeks, count the meetings that have notes in each place. In most mixed calendars the overlap is smaller than people expect.
If you want the mechanics of capturing both sides of a Zoom call on a Mac — and why QuickTime cannot — the Zoom recording guide covers all four routes. For a comparison against a cloud transcription service rather than a platform feature, see Narada vs Otter.
Sources
All fetched and read on 4 August 2026.
- Zoom Support KB0058013, Using Meeting Summary with AI — prerequisites, host-only start, guest exclusions.
- Zoom Support KB0057623, Getting started with Zoom AI features — admin enable controls.
- Zoom Support KB0083849, Using My Notes — device audio capture, host toggle, cloud storage.
- Zoom Support KB0080354, Using AI Companion in third-party meetings — bot behaviour, Meet and Teams only.
- Zoom Support KB0078144, Supported languages for Zoom AI features — the 32-language list.
- Zoom Support KB0085614, Understanding and managing Zoom AI Credits — metered vs unmetered features.
- zoom.com/en/compare/zoom-vs-other-ai-tools — $14.16, $8.33 and $20 figures.
- zoom.com/en/products/ai-assistant/features/ai-note-taking — My Notes tiers, “no bots required”, in-person caps.
- zoom.com/en/products/collaboration-tools/zoom-workplace-pro — “included at no additional cost”.
- library.zoom.com/ai-whitepaper/models-processing-storage-and-usage — training denial, named providers, zero retention.
- zoom.com/en/blog/ai-companion-data-residency-options — Zoom-Hosted Models tiers, “including the US”.
- news.zoom.com/zoom-launches-zoommate — $20/user/month, North America at launch.
- learn.microsoft.com/microsoftteams/intelligent-recap-calls-meetings — licensing stack, supported meeting types.
- support.microsoft.com — Recap in Microsoft Teams — “isn’t in your org won’t have access”.
- microsoft.com/microsoft-teams/premium and microsoft.com/microsoft-365/copilot/business — add-on prices.
- blog.google — Take notes for me — “meetings that you host”.
- support.google.com/meet/answer/14925782 — the 8 supported note-taking languages.
- workspace.google.com/pricing?hl=en-US®ion=US — $7 / $14 / $22 USD.
- FluidAudio project documentation — Parakeet TDT v3, 25 European languages, and the FLEURS word-error-rate table quoted above. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FluidInference/FluidAudio/main/Documentation/Benchmarks.md
Questions people ask about this
Can I get a Zoom AI summary of a meeting I did not host?
Not the Meeting Summary feature. Zoom’s documentation says only the host and co-host can start or stop it, and that participants who joined ad hoc or without authenticating do not receive the emailed summary at all. Zoom’s separate My Notes feature can run as a participant, but the host has a “Transcribe in My Notes” toggle that switches it off for you.
Does Zoom AI Companion work on Teams and Google Meet calls?
Two ways. AI Companion can be invited into Google Meet and Microsoft Teams meetings, where Zoom’s docs say it “will join the meeting as a participant” with Zoom branding and the owner’s name in its tile. My Notes covers those platforms without a bot by transcribing the device’s own system and microphone audio.
Is Narada cheaper than Zoom AI Companion?
The recorder is free and Narada Pro AI is $6.99/month or $69.99/year with a 3-day trial (checked 4 August 2026). Zoom’s cheapest paid route to AI notes is My Notes standalone at $8.33/user/month billed annually. But if you already pay for a Zoom Workplace plan, the core AI features are included, which is hard to beat on price.
Does Narada label who said what?
It separates voices on the call’s audio and labels them Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on — it does not know their names and does not guess. Your own lines are attributed to you, because your microphone is recorded as a separate file. A microphone-only recording has no speaker separation at all.
Try it on your next call
Narada records your Mac's audio and your microphone, transcribes on-device, and hands you the decisions and follow-ups. Free to use, no account, no bot in the meeting.