Sprachmemo vs Otter.ai

Voice is the most personal data shape there is. A short audio clip captures vocal stress, side-of-the-room ambient noise, the names of children and colleagues - all without you ever typing those names anywhere. When that audio leaves the EU, the recourse you have under GDPR effectively collapses to whatever the foreign provider has volunteered in their Terms of Service. Sprachmemo keeps every byte of audio on Hetzner Falkenstein. The transcription engine runs on the same machines. Nothing transits a third-party cloud.

Honest: Otter's English model has been trained on a vast corpus of US-business speech. For an English-only workflow with multiple speakers, in a Zoom call, with someone needing real-time captions - Otter is the right tool today. We don't pretend to compete on that segment of the market.

Sprachmemo lets you tap the green circle on the landing page and record before you sign in. The clip stays in your browser (IndexedDB) until you create an account, then syncs automatically. This isn't just a UX touch - it's the only path where a one-off recording (a quick voice memo from a moving train, a half-finished thought in a parking lot) can become a kept artefact without a prior commitment to the product. Otter, like nearly every transcription service, requires an account before you can press record.