Recall.ai
Meeting recording API that captures transcripts, MP4 video, and per-speaker audio from Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls
If diarization accuracy or platform coverage is the thing standing between your team and launch, this is the meeting recording API to shortlist — per-participant audio streams solve a problem most competitors quietly work around, and the free Calendar API removes a second vendor from your build. The 99.9% SLA, SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / HIPAA / GDPR posture, and $38M Series B answer the procurement questions a legal-tech or healthcare buyer will ask. Pass only if you want a finished notetaker for your
Verified 2d ago · liveness 83/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/recall-ai
- AI notetaker and AI scribe products that need verbatim speaker attribution across multi-platform calls
- Sales conversation intelligence tools requiring a separate audio stream per participant
- Compliance recording systems that need a 99.9% uptime SLA, a HIPAA BAA, and US/EU/JP data residency
- Teams building interactive meeting agents that display images, play audio, and post chat into the call
- Buyers who want a finished notetaker app with a UI — Otter and Fireflies cover that job
- Windows desktop recording today — the Desktop Recording SDK ships for macOS
- Phone or in-person capture as a shipping requirement — the Mobile Recording SDK is still listed as Coming Soon
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Skip Recall.ai if you want a finished notetaker app for your own team rather than an API — it ships no end-user UI, so Otter or Fireflies is the cheaper path.
Using Recall.ai's built-in transcription instead of a third-party provider adds $0.15 per hour of recording on top of the $0.50/hr recording rate.
Pay As You Go at $0.50/hr of recording suits pre-seed and seed teams building a proof of concept, with 5 free hours to start. Series A+ teams running real volume should apply for the startup rate of $0.25/hr for the first 10,000 hours or move to Launch for custom volume pricing. Enterprise is for regulated buyers who need SSO, uptime guarantees, and a BAA. Compared with rolling your own bot infrastructure, the $0.50/hr is usually cheaper than the engineering time it replaces.
In short
Recall.ai — Meeting recording API that captures transcripts, MP4 video, and per-speaker audio from Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls. Best for AI notetaker and AI scribe products that need verbatim speaker attribution across multi-platform calls, Sales conversation intelligence tools requiring a separate audio stream per participant, Compliance recording systems that need a 99.9% uptime SLA, a HIPAA BAA, and US/EU/JP data residency. Free to start; paid plans from $0.25.
No head-to-head comparison for Recall.ai yet — the alternatives below are the closest matches we list.
What's new in Recall.ai
Checked todayAcross the latest 4 updates: 4 news mentions.
How to build an AI scribe for telehealth
A tutorial walking through building an AI scribe for telehealth, with an open-source sample app and demo, plus a companion post on an AI interview assistant that takes notes, joins calls, and interacts in real time.
Using ScreenCaptureKit to capture meeting audio
A guide on recording meetings with ScreenCaptureKit programmatically, covering the demo, its limitations, and alternatives, with a companion deep-dive on Core Audio Taps for macOS system audio.
Guide to real-time transcription providers (2026)
Recall.ai compares real-time transcription APIs for 2026, including Deepgram, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, AWS, Rev, and Speechmatics.
Syncing calendar data with Recall.ai's Calendar API
Covers the free Recall Calendar v1 integration and a companion post explaining the v2 integration for custom scheduling logic, each with a working sample.
What people actually say about Recall.ai — is it worth it?
We ran a structured research pass across product reviews, community discussions, and post-purchase forum threads to surface the patterns vendors won't publish themselves. Below: the recurring strengths, the hidden costs people mention most, and the cohort that consistently regrets adopting this tool.
49 mentions across 4 sources (Hacker News, YouTube, Product Hunt, Lemmy) · researched Aug 14, 2026.
Average across the 4 sources that answered — each source counts once, not each post.
- +Accurate speaker diarization even with overlapping speech, thanks to separate audio streams.
- +Easy to integrate: many developers report working bots within 24 hours.
- +Professional MP4 recordings with speaker and gallery views, not grainy screencasts.
- +Rich metadata: 100+ data points per meeting, including participants, chat, and screenshare.
- +Consent management and breakout room support built in for compliance.
- −Per-hour pricing plus transcription can get expensive for high-volume use.
- −Not a turn-key app; requires coding skills to integrate.
- −Podcast support is unreliable despite claims of universal coverage.
- −Free tier only stores recordings for 7 days, then you pay extra.
- −No mobile recording yet, despite the upcoming SDK announcement.
- • Transcription is an add-on at $0.15/hr.
- • Storage beyond 7 days costs $0.05/hr per 30 days.
- • Enterprise features are not available on pay-as-you-go.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Recall.ai? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Meeting Bot API that joins Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and Slack Huddles calls
- Desktop Recording SDK for on-device capture with no bot in the call (macOS)
- Calendar API for participant emails, names, and meeting titles, free to use, with v1 and v2 integrations
- Mobile Recording SDK for phone, VOIP, and in-person meetings (listed as Coming Soon)
- Per-participant audio streams for speaker diarization even during overlapping speech
- Separate participant video streams for per-person capture
- Real-time and async transcripts through a unified API
- Bring-your-own transcription (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, AWS, Rev, Speechmatics) or built-in at $0.15/hr
- MP4 recordings with switchable speaker and gallery view
- Send chat messages and read meeting chat messages from your integration
- Display images in a meeting and stream audio into the call for interactive AI agents and avatars
- Breakout room and screenshare data capture
- Recording consent management built into the recording flow
- Zoom RTMS (Real-Time Media Streams) partnership for real-time meeting data
- Choose US, EU, or JP data residency for recordings and transcripts
About Recall.ai
Recall.ai is the API platform developers use to pull transcripts, recordings, and metadata out of video meetings without maintaining their own bot infrastructure. One API call gets your product into Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and Slack Huddles, and returns real-time and async transcripts, MP4 recordings, participant names and emails, screenshare data, and chat messages. Four products cover the capture surface: the Meeting Bot API (a bot joins the call — the right choice when you need explicit recording consent or you're building an agent that speaks and shows images in the meeting), the Desktop Recording SDK (on-device capture with no bot in the room), the Calendar API (participant emails, names, and meeting titles from Google Calendar and Microsoft Calendar, free to use), and the Mobile Recording SDK for phone, VOIP, and in-person capture, which the site still lists as Coming Soon. Two engineering choices carry most of the differentiation. Each participant's audio is captured on a separate stream, so diarization stays correct even when people talk over each other, and recordings come out as clean MP4s you can switch between speaker and gallery view instead of a screen capture dotted with UI chrome. Below that sits a unified surface of 100+ data points — real-time audio and video, async MP4s, separate participant video streams, breakout room data, and two-way chat. Transcription is bring-your-own (Deepgram, AssemblyAI, ElevenLabs, AWS, Rev, Speechmatics) or built-in at $0.15/hr, and you can choose US, EU, or JP data residency. Who it's for is fairly specific: engineering teams shipping an AI notetaker, an AI scribe, a sales conversation intelligence tool, a compliance recorder, or an interactive meeting agent that needs to display video and play audio into the call. Recent engineering writing — a 2026 guide to real-time transcription providers, ScreenCaptureKit and Core Audio Taps walkthroughs, and a telehealth AI scribe tutorial
Behind the Verdict
Most teams arrive at Recall.ai after burning a quarter on bot infrastructure. Joining Zoom and Teams calls reliably is a grind of auth flows, waiting-room edge cases, and permission changes, and that's before you deal with speaker attribution. Recall.ai's answer is to capture each participant's audio on its own stream, which means the transcript knows who spoke even when three people talk over each other. That single design choice is why we'd point a notetaker or interviewing product here rather than at a generic capture API. Pick it when you're building capture into your own product and you want one integration across Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and Slack Huddles. Pick it when a compliance recorder needs a 99.9% SLA and a HIPAA BAA, or when you're building an interactive agent that displays images and plays audio into the call — the bot can act, not just listen. Pick it when you want calendar metadata without paying for it, since the Calendar API is free and both v1 and v2 integrations have working samples in the docs. The startup rate of $0.25/hr for the first 10,000 hours is a real discount for seed-stage teams burning hours on testing. Where it bites: this ships you no end-user interface. If your team wants meeting notes for itself, Otter or Fireflies will be cheaper and faster than anything you assemble here. The Desktop Recording SDK is macOS-only today, so a Windows-first desktop strategy has to wait or route through the bot. Phone and in-person capture is still listed as Coming Soon, which rules it out if those are launch requirements rather than roadmap items. And the billing model takes some planning: storage is free for 7 days, then $0.05 per hour of recording retained for 30 days, so long retention windows add up on top of the
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Recall.ai actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
Sign up for Pay As You Go, use the free 5 hours to wire the Meeting Bot API into a Zoom OAuth flow, and pull real-time transcripts from the unified API while the bot sits in the call.
Outcome: A working meeting bot in production in days rather than the months an in-house build would take, with no transcription vendor chosen yet since the built-in option is available at $0.15/hr.
Send the bot into Gong-style recorded calls, take each participant's separate audio stream, and run sentiment and keyword analysis per speaker rather than on a mixed track.
Outcome: Speaker-level analytics that survive overlapping speech, which a single mixed audio stream cannot deliver reliably.
Move to the Enterprise plan for SSO, uptime guarantees, and a signed BAA, then record calls through the Meeting Bot API with consent management and choose US, EU, or JP data residency.
Outcome: Meeting recordings that satisfy HIPAA and internal audit requirements while using the same API the product team already integrated.
Use Cases
- Build a meeting bot that joins Zoom calls and returns diarized transcripts in real time.
- Integrate meeting recording into a CRM to automatically log call summaries and action items.
- Create a desktop app that records and transcribes meetings without a bot in the room.
- Analyze sales calls by extracting speaker-separated audio for sentiment or keyword analysis.
- Develop an AI avatar that displays images and streams audio into a live meeting.
- Build a compliance recording solution for regulated industries like finance or healthcare.
- Automate interview notes and scorecards for recruiting or user research teams.
- Build an AI scribe for telehealth or clinical documentation.
Limitations
- Free storage is limited to 7 days; extended storage costs $0.05/hr per 30 days.
- Built-in transcription adds $0.15/hr on top of the recording rate unless you bring a third-party provider.
- The Desktop Recording SDK is macOS-only today.
- The Mobile Recording SDK is listed as Coming Soon and is not yet available, so phone and in-person capture cannot be a launch requirement.
- 4-core bots carry an additional $0.10/hr and GPU bots an extra $1/hr, which bites if you plan to have your bot output audio or video into the call.
- This is a cloud API, not a self-hostable or on-prem deployment.
as of 2026-10-09
Verification history
We have re-verified Recall.ai 21 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-checked, vendor evidence unchanged
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 21 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Recall.ai tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Pay As You Go
$0.50/hr of recording
Ideal for
Pre-seed and seed teams building a proof of concept, and anyone who wants to test the Meeting Bot API or Desktop Recording SDK against real calls.
What this tier adds
Starting tier: 5 free hours, then $0.50/hr of recording billed to the second, with email and dashboard support.
Launch
Custom
Ideal for
Series A and later companies shipping a product on top of Recall.ai and running enough volume to want custom terms and a real support channel.
What this tier adds
Adds custom volume pricing and a shared Slack channel for support on top of Pay As You Go features.
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Regulated or large organizations that need SSO, contractual guarantees, and a signed HIPAA BAA before they can put meeting recording into production.
What this tier adds
Adds SSO, uptime guarantees, custom contract redlining, a BAA for HIPAA compliance, and white-glove Slack support.
Startup Program
$0.25/hr for first 10,000 hours
Ideal for
Early-stage startups that have meeting data built into their product and can commit to running real volume.
What this tier adds
Introductory rate of $0.25/hr for the first 10,000 hours, lower than the standard $0.50/hr, and requires an application.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Recall.ai's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Pay As You Go at $0.50/hr of recording suits pre-seed and seed teams building a proof of concept, with 5 free hours to start. Series A+ teams running real volume should apply for the startup rate of $0.25/hr for the first 10,000 hours or move to Launch for custom volume pricing. Enterprise is for regulated buyers who need SSO, uptime guarantees, and a BAA. Compared with rolling your own bot infrastructure, the $0.50/hr is usually cheaper than the engineering time it replaces.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Recall.ai — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
A single developer can get a first bot into a Zoom call in under a day — the vendor advertises a 24-hour integration, and the quickstart is a couple of lines of code. Producing real-time transcripts and handling consent flows realistically takes a few days. A full production rollout with billing, storage policy, and multi-platform support is a matter of weeks, not months.
Switching to or from Recall.ai
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From an in-house bot build: replace your Zoom and Teams capture code with the Meeting Bot API and keep your downstream transcript pipeline.
- →From a single-platform recorder: move to Recall.ai to add Google Meet, Webex, GoTo Meeting, and Slack Huddles coverage behind one API.
- →From a screen-recording approach: switch to Recall.ai's MP4 output to get switchable speaker and gallery views instead of UI-heavy captures.
- →From a separate calendar integration: drop it for the free Calendar API to get participant emails and meeting titles.
- ↗To Otter or Fireflies: if you no longer want to build, buy a finished notetaker instead of an API.
- ↗To a self-hosted capture stack: only if on-prem infrastructure is a hard requirement, since Recall.ai is a cloud API.
- ↗To a single-platform vendor: only if you have narrowed to one conferencing platform and do not need the breadth.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
Tutorials & Learning
Recall - NotebookLM、Notion、Obsidian を組み合わせた AI 知識ベース (チュートリアル パート 1)
Joseph Chandler
Recall.ai Demo (Real Time AI Meetup)
RecallAI
How to build a meeting notetaker (with demo)
RecallAI
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Recall.ai”, and we withheld 3: 3 could not be judged, because “Recall.ai” is a single word that other videos use for other things. Showing the 3 we can prove are about Recall.ai.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Recall.ai
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Recall.ai, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Recall.ai Meeting API
Recall.ai is a meeting recording API that captures each participant on a separate audio stream for speaker-accurate transcripts.
Read.ai
Read.ai is an AI meeting assistant that turns Zoom, Meet, and Teams calls into searchable summaries, action items, and transcripts.
Otter.ai
Otter.ai meeting transcription turns Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls into searchable notes, summaries, and action items.
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Recall.ai Meeting API
Recall.ai is a meeting recording API that captures each participant on a separate audio stream for speaker-accurate transcripts.
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