Notta vs Hearing Buddy
One is a meeting notetaker that shows up when you search for captioning apps. The other is built for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Here's an honest look at both, so you end up with the right tool.
By Lilly Seay · Updated July 6, 2026
Notta and Hearing Buddy solve different problems. Notta records meetings: its bots join Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, it transcribes uploaded files, and it works in 58 languages — but the free plan stops every conversation at 3 minutes, blocks exports, and the 3-day trial auto-bills $97.99 for a year. Hearing Buddy is a captioning app for daily life with hearing loss: unlimited free captions with no meter anywhere, processed entirely on your iPhone. If you found Notta while searching for help hearing conversations, keep reading.
Choose Hearing Buddy if…
- You want captions for real conversations — a doctor's visit, a family dinner — not a 3-minute clip of one
- You're deaf or hard of hearing and want an app whose entire job is helping you follow what people say
- Privacy matters — captions are processed entirely on your iPhone, so your audio is never uploaded
- Your group is in the room with you, on iPhones — Buddy Mode captions everyone together, free, no internet needed
- You want a wrist tap on Apple Watch when someone says your name or asks you a question
- You never want to set a calendar reminder to cancel a trial — Hearing Buddy's captions are simply free
Choose Notta if…
- You need a meeting notetaker — Notta's bots join Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams calls and take notes for you
- You transcribe recordings — Notta accepts audio and video file uploads; Hearing Buddy only captions live conversation
- You work in a language Hearing Buddy doesn't caption — Notta transcribes 58 languages and translates text into 42
- You need transcription on Android, the web, or Windows — Hearing Buddy is all-Apple
- Your iPhone can't run iOS 26 — Notta supports iOS 13 and later
Side by side
| Feature |  Hearing Buddy | Notta |
|---|---|---|
| Free live captions | Unlimited, full quality No session limits — caption all day, every day | 120 minutes/month Every conversation is capped at 3 minutes on the free plan |
| Export & share transcripts | Free Copy and share any conversation from your history | Pro only Free plan can't export, and Notta's FAQ says free users can only view the first 3 minutes of a transcript |
| What "free" leads to | Nothing — free is free No trial to cancel, no card on file; captions are never metered | 3-day trial, then $97.99/yr Notta's web trial auto-bills the annual plan the moment it ends (as of July 6, 2026) |
| Where your audio is processed | 100% on your iPhone Audio never leaves your device | Cloud servers Transcripts are generated remotely; internet required |
| Works offline | Yes Basements, airplanes, spotty rural signal — captions keep working | No Needs a connection to transcribe |
| Apple Watch name & question alerts | Yes, with Buddy+ A tap on your wrist when someone says your name or asks you something | Not offered |
| Group conversations on multiple phones | Buddy Mode — free iPhones in the same room connect directly; everyone's words merge into one timeline, no internet required | Not offered Notta's bots join video calls; it doesn't link phones in a room |
| Meeting bots & file transcription | Not offered Hearing Buddy captions live conversation only | Yes Bots join Zoom, Google Meet & Teams; free plan includes 50 file uploads/month |
| Tells voices apart on one phone | Speaker Labels, with Buddy+ Colors tell up to four voices apart — no voice training, nothing stored, resets every session | Speaker identification Part of Notta's cloud transcription |
| Languages | Captions in 8, translation into 10 All on-device — translation works offline too | Transcribes 58, translates into 42 One of the widest language ranges in the category, via the cloud |
| Platforms | iPhone, Watch, Mac & Vision Pro All-Apple; iPhone requires iOS 26 or later | iOS 13+, Android, web Broad cross-platform coverage |
| Built for the deaf & HOH community | Yes It's the entire mission | Built for meetings Notta's guides recommend it to deaf users, but the product is designed around workplace note-taking |
Notta details verified from notta.ai/en/pricing, Notta's help center, and the Notta App Store listing on July 6, 2026. Plans and limits change — always confirm current details with Notta directly.
What Actually Separates Them
A conversation is longer than three minutes
Notta's free plan gives you 120 transcription minutes a month — but each conversation is capped at 3 minutes, exports are reserved for the Pro plan, and Notta's own FAQ notes that free users can only view the first 3 minutes of a transcript. For sampling a meeting tool before buying, that's a reasonable teaser. For someone who is hard of hearing, it means the captions stop right as the doctor gets to the part that matters.
Hearing Buddy takes the opposite view: captions are the whole point, so they're unlimited and free. No per-conversation cap, no monthly meter, no export paywall — your transcript history lives on your phone and you can copy or share any of it. The paid tier (Buddy+, $59.99/year) adds extras like Apple Watch alerts and summaries; it never unlocks the captions themselves.
The trial that bills a year at a time
Notta's upgrade path runs through a 3-day free trial, and its own help center is direct about what happens next: the $97.99 annual fee is charged as soon as the trial ends unless you cancel before the exact expiry time. That's the web price — the iOS in-app annual plans run $98.99 to $114.99, or $14.99 monthly. None of this is hidden, but it catches people: as of July 2026, Notta's Trustpilot rating sits at 2.0 out of 5 ("Poor") from roughly 165 reviews, 79% of them one-star, with trial auto-charges, refund friction, and cancellation difficulty as the dominant themes. Trustpilot also displayed a fake-review warning on Notta's profile as recently as January 2026, after removing fraudulent reviews. To be fair, its US App Store rating tells a happier story — 4.0 out of 5 across about 1,400 ratings — the unhappiness clusters around billing, not transcription.
Hearing Buddy doesn't have a trial because there's nothing to trial into: captions are free forever, with no card on file and no account at all. If you later want Buddy+, it's $59.99 a year — a bit more than half of Notta's Pro price — and the captions stay free either way.
On your phone, not in the cloud
Notta transcribes in the cloud — that's what makes 58 languages, meeting bots, and cross-device sync possible, and it means your audio travels to Notta's servers and transcription stops when your connection does.
Hearing Buddy processes everything on your iPhone. Your audiology appointment, your therapy session, your family argument — no audio ever leaves your device, and captions keep working with no signal at all: basements, flights, dead zones.
Even translation stays on the phone: captions can be translated live into any of 10 reading languages using language packs that run entirely on your iPhone (Cantonese is the one caption language that can't be translated yet). And Buddy Mode — free group captioning between iPhones in the same room — connects phones directly to each other, so a five-person dinner gets one shared caption timeline, each person's words shown by name in their color, with no internet and no server anywhere in the loop.
Built around hearing loss, down to the wrist
Everything in Notta is shaped around meetings: bots, action items, summaries you push into other work tools. Everything in Hearing Buddy is shaped around hearing loss: with Buddy+, your Apple Watch taps you when someone says your name or asks you a question — so you can stay present in the room instead of staring at a screen. No other captioning app offers it, and it's not something a meeting tool would ever think to build.
Buddy+ also adds conversation summaries (your Buddy catches you up on what a conversation is about and its mood), Speaker Labels that tell up to four voices apart without training or storing anything, and translation for solo sessions — $59.99 a year, with the captions themselves free forever.
When Notta Is the Better Choice
We'd rather you end up with the right tool than with our app. If your actual problem is meetings and recordings rather than hearing the room around you, Notta covers real ground we don't:
You need a meeting notetaker
Notta's bots join Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, transcribe them, and generate summaries you can send to other tools. Hearing Buddy has no meeting bots and never will pretend to — if your goal is automated meeting notes, Notta is built for exactly that.
You transcribe recordings and files
Notta accepts audio and video file uploads (50 per month even on the free plan) and turns them into text. Hearing Buddy only captions live conversation as it happens — there's no file import at all.
You need many languages
Notta transcribes real-time audio in 58 languages and translates text into 42. Hearing Buddy currently captions 8 languages with live translation into 10. If your language isn't on our list yet, Notta's coverage is genuinely wide.
You're not all-Apple, or your iPhone is older
Notta runs on iOS 13 and later, on Android, and on the web. Hearing Buddy lives on iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and Vision Pro, and the iPhone app requires iOS 26 or later — if your device can't update that far, Hearing Buddy simply won't install.
What You'll Actually Pay
- Unlimited real-time captions — free
- Buddy Mode group captions — free
- Background listening & transcript history — free
- Buddy+: $59.99/year
- Buddy+ adds Watch alerts, summaries, Speaker Labels, solo translation, and Buddy personalities
- Free: 120 min/month, 3-minute cap per conversation, no export
- Pro: $8.17/mo billed annually — $97.99/yr on the web
- iOS in-app: $14.99/mo, or $98.99–$114.99/yr for annual plans
- 3-day web trial auto-bills the $97.99 annual plan when it ends
- Business and Enterprise plans for teams
Prices checked July 6, 2026 on notta.ai/en/pricing, Notta's help center, and both apps' App Store listings. If anything here has changed, let us know and we'll fix it.
Trying Hearing Buddy takes about a minute
There's no trial clock, no card on file, and no account to create. Most people simply try it alongside whatever they use today.
Download free
No account, no email, no credit card — the App Store is the only signup there is.
Tap the mic
Captions start instantly, and they don't stop at minute three.
Keep what works
Plenty of people keep a meeting tool like Notta for work calls and use Hearing Buddy for everything else. That's a fine answer too.
Questions & answers
Notta has a free plan, but it comes with hard limits (as of July 6, 2026): 120 transcription minutes per month, every conversation capped at 3 minutes, and no transcript export — Notta's own FAQ says free users can only view the first 3 minutes of a transcript. Hearing Buddy's captions are unlimited and free, with no per-conversation caps and free copy/share from your transcript history.
As of July 6, 2026, Notta Pro costs $8.17/month billed annually — $97.99/year — on the web. In the iOS app, subscriptions run $14.99/month or $98.99–$114.99/year depending on the plan. Business and Enterprise tiers cost more. Hearing Buddy's optional Buddy+ tier costs $59.99/year, and the captions themselves are free without it.
Yes. Notta's help center states that the $97.99 annual fee is charged as soon as the 3-day trial ends, unless you cancel before the exact expiry time. Billing complaints — trial auto-charges, refund friction, cancellation difficulty — are the dominant theme in Notta's Trustpilot reviews as of July 2026. Hearing Buddy has no trial at all: captions are free forever, so there's nothing to cancel and no card on file.
As of July 2026, Notta's Trustpilot rating is 2.0 out of 5 — the "Poor" band — from roughly 165 reviews, 79% of them one-star, mostly about billing rather than transcription quality. Trustpilot also displayed a fake-review warning on Notta's profile as recently as January 2026, after removing fraudulent reviews. For balance: Notta's US App Store rating is a much healthier 4.0 out of 5 across about 1,400 ratings.
Notta can transcribe live speech, and its blog recommends it for deaf users — but the product is designed around workplace meetings: bots, action items, and summaries, with free live transcription stopping at 3 minutes per conversation. An app built for hearing loss looks different: unlimited free captions, offline support, group captioning in the room, and Apple Watch alerts when someone says your name. That's what Hearing Buddy is for. If you need both meeting notes and daily-life captions, using both is perfectly reasonable.
Yes. Real-time captions, Buddy Mode group captions, background listening, transcript history, and copy/share are free with no minute meters or session limits. The optional Buddy+ upgrade ($59.99/year) adds Apple Watch name and question alerts, conversation summaries, Speaker Labels, translation for solo sessions, and Buddy personality choices — but the captions themselves are never paywalled, and there's no trial that converts into a charge.
Hearing Buddy processes all audio on your iPhone — no audio ever leaves your device, and captions work fully offline. Even Buddy Mode group sessions connect iPhones directly to each other rather than through a server. Notta transcribes on cloud servers, which is what enables its meeting bots, file uploads, and 58 languages — but your audio does leave the device and an internet connection is required.
No. Hearing Buddy is built for Apple devices — iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac, and Vision Pro — and requires iOS 26 or later on iPhone. Notta runs on iOS 13+, Android, and the web — if you need cross-platform transcription or your iPhone can't run iOS 26, Notta or another cross-platform tool is the better fit.
Three minutes isn't a conversation.
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Available on iPhone, Apple Watch, Mac & Vision Pro
Notta is a trademark of Notta Inc.; the Notta iOS app is published by Mind Cruiser Limited. Hearing Buddy is independently made and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Notta Inc. or Mind Cruiser Limited. All Notta pricing, plan, rating, and feature details on this page were verified on July 6, 2026 from notta.ai, Notta's help center, the Notta App Store listing, and currently indexed Trustpilot data; plans and ratings change, so please confirm current details with Notta. This page reflects our honest assessment — and yes, we tell you when Notta is the better choice.