Record what matters. Extract what matters. Keep it where you choose.
Otter.ai keeps your meetings in a permanent cloud workspace and hands back a generic summary. Before You Forget does the opposite: it processes everything on your iPhone, gives you a structured brief and a follow-up draft, and lets you keep or delete the source — there's no cloud copy in the first place.
Recording, transcription, and analysis run on your iPhone using Apple's on-device intelligence. Your conversation is never uploaded to our servers.
Purpose-built extraction — decisions, red flags, follow-ups — rather than a generic summary parked in a workspace forever.
You choose whether to keep or delete the source recording. There's no permanent vault to leak, subpoena, retain, or train on.
| Before You Forget | Otter.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Where it's processed | On your iPhone | Vendor cloud |
| Retention | You keep or delete the source | Permanent cloud workspace |
| Output | Structured brief + follow-up draft | Generic summary |
| Where it's stored | Export to your storage | Vendor cloud |
| Hardware | iPhone only | Phone / desktop |
Compiled June 2026 from public product and pricing pages; plans change often — verify before relying on this. Context, as of June 2026: AI meeting note-takers have drawn privacy litigation over recording consent and training-data use, including the consolidated In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation (N.D. Cal., 2025), which is pending — the allegations have not been proven.
Otter processes and stores your meetings in a cloud workspace and returns a generic summary. Before You Forget processes on your iPhone, never uploads your conversation to our servers, gives you a structured brief plus a follow-up draft, and lets you keep or delete the source.
No. Recording, transcription, and analysis all run on-device using Apple's on-device intelligence. There's no cloud copy because we never receive it.
No. Your conversation never reaches our servers, so there's nothing for us to train on.
iPhone 15 Pro and newer — they have the A17 Pro chip needed for Apple's on-device intelligence. We never fall back to the cloud, so older iPhones aren't supported.
Before You Forget is built for in-person, in-the-room conversations on your iPhone rather than auto-joining video calls.
Get early access to a private, on-device alternative to Otter.ai.
Get early accessiPhone 15 Pro & newer · App Store launch coming soon