Superwhisper is partnering with Cohere to launch a local meeting recorder, putting the consumer AI dictation tool it in competition with enterprise meeting assistant companies like Granola and Otter.
The companies, which are both headquartered in Toronto, announced on Thursday that Superwhisper users can now access Cohere’s AI models to record and transcribe meetings, allowing them to take advantage of the enterprise AI company’s smaller language models, which are trained with far fewer parameters than large language models. Cohere’s Transcribe model will transcribe what was said, while its Tiny Aya model will provide meeting summaries and action items.
“Having our core audience realize the power of a tool like this is going to be big for our growth strategy.”
Brendan James, Superwhisper
Notably, using this feature with Cohere’s models lets it run locally on a user’s device, without storing that data with Superwhisper, the company said. Meeting recorder competitors such as Otter have seen legal action alleging privacy breaches, including a lawsuit claiming that it deceptively recorded and stored private user conversations. Otter was also embroiled in a controversy in an Ontario hospital when sensitive patient data was mistakenly shared with dozens of people.
“Privacy has always been a main point of our brand, because dictation is obviously so sensitive,” Superwhisper head of growth Brendan James said in an interview.
Founded in 2023 by PartnerStack co-founder Neil Chudleigh, Superwhisper is on a mission to allow people to do work primarily through voice dictation instead of typing on keyboards. The startup’s platform allows users to select different AI models of varying sizes to perform voice-to-text transcription, and previously partnered with Cohere to use its AI transcription model. It also released its own small, open-weight transcription cleanup model, S1, which appears as a default when users sign up.
Superwhisper already had a setting for meeting recording in its consumer dictation product, James said, but it wasn’t the easiest to find and was mostly employed by technically minded users. The team felt that with Cohere’s locally run models, they could offer an edge over other transcription services that are largely cloud-based (meaning the data is stored in the cloud rather than on a user’s device).
“This tool is our biggest swing at a full-company suite of products,” James said.
The tool doesn’t join meetings as an individual participant (a phenomenon some tech leaders have complained about), and James said this was intentional because the team finds it “invasive.” Canadian meeting-assistant startup Fellow works similarly and has called the feature “botless recording.”
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With the launch, Superwhisper is envisioning a push toward more enterprise clients. A significant portion of its user base consists of software developers dictating instructions to AI coding assistants—essentially, speaking code into terminals. The idea is to have its most frequent users try out the new tool and encourage adoption across their companies.
“Meeting tools are a dime a dozen. There’s so much competition,” James said. “Having our core audience realize the power of a tool like this is going to be big for our growth strategy.”
The company currently has professionals at big-name tech companies OpenAI, Meta, and Shopify using its transcription tools, James claimed. Earlier this summer, Superwhisper told BetaKit that its revenue split used to be mostly from individual users, but has increasingly grown toward enterprise plans.
Superwhisper prices its pro subscriptions at monthly, annual, or a one-time flat rate, but for the moment, it isn’t charging a premium for access to the meeting tool. In the near future, James said, they’ll likely revisit enterprise pricing.
Feature image courtesy Superwhisper.