Recording without Consent and Legal Implications
A primary concern raised by users is the ethical and legal implications of recording calls without informing participants. This highlights the complexity of consent laws across different jurisdictions.
- bingemaker "Pardon my ignorance, but is recording a call without informing the other participants considered bad practice?"
- davidgu "You're right, and I agree that participants should be aware when they’re being recorded. Because consent laws are complex and vary by region and industry, we leave the consent flow to the developer and we provide the tools and guidance to do it correctly. As with our Meeting Bot API, we also urge teams to follow local laws and make recording clearly visible to users."
- rsingel "It's illegal in some states, legal in others."
- jcelerier "It's not just bad practice, it's illegal in many countries. It is in France for instance - but it's not like you can actively prevent it."
Pricing and Value Proposition
The cost of the service, particularly at the starter rate of "$0.70 per hour," was a point of discussion, with users comparing it to existing integrated solutions and questioning its value.
- berz01 "70 cents per hour is a mountain of fees... basically a $1 per meeting. Sheesh."
- davidgu "$0.70/hr is our starter rate for low-volume testing. In production, developers will see higher usage and choose to commit to volume and longer-term usage. Because this, we've seen most teams don’t pay the starter price once they scale beyond early pilots."
- galaxy_gas "What is the value in paying this massive cost when Teams, Zoom all support ootb?"
- davidgu "Enabling transcription/recordings per platform and remembering to record creates user-dependent setup. Also the host often needs to install apps which adds security friction, and you still have to build and maintain separate implementations for Zoom/Meet/Teams which is often a cost that devs don't want to deal with. Instead, we built a single API that can get the same results without the issues mentioned above so you can focus on building the features your users care about."
- nduncan_hmc "It is a lot but processing real time video and audio streams inherently consumes alot of CPU. So they may not be making as much profit on that price as you'd think. I run an open source alternative to Recall (for meeting bots), and our costs are about 8 cents per hour."
Core Value Proposition: Infrastructure Abstraction
Several users and the founder emphasized that Recall's primary value lies in abstracting the complex infrastructure required to integrate with various meeting platforms, rather than just providing transcription.
- chaos_emergent "Recall provides transcription as an auxiliary service, not their core value prop. Recall is, at its core, an API for bot recording. As someone building an application that relies heavily on conversational data, recording meetings is really important. Recall makes that process as easy as an API call, standardized across various meeting platforms. It's a huge PITA to set up infrastructure to get bots to join meetings that handle each platforms' proclivities, encoding and storing video data, etc."
- davidgu "I actually agree that it’s become incredibly easy to transcribe conversations using open-source models, and that’s not where Recall adds the most value. The hard part is building the infrastructure that allows you to get real-time access to the raw audio, video, and transcript data directly from the meeting platforms. We abstract all of that away and provide you with a clean interface to access that data. Once you get the data, you could use any of the models that you mentioned to do your own transcription, or transcribe using Recall’s transcription models."
- agwp "I'm curious given your decision to capture speaker names from the screen. I see the merits during desktop recording, but I can also see how this limits utility when trying to offer the same functionality across desktop and other scenarios (e.g. in-person meetings, audio uploads etc.)"
- davidgu "We already support diarization in the Desktop Recording SDK by capturing the meeting platform’s speaker-change events, so you get a diarized transcript plus precise “speaker started talking” timestamps out of the box. We also support voice-signature diarization via third-party STT providers for participants calling in from the same room. For in-person meetings and audio uploads, this is on our roadmap and in development. More to come on this!"
- apollopower "Congrats Recall team, I've been a customer for the past 1.5 years and the entire infra layer behind meetings has let our company really focus on "What makes our beer taste better" instead of having to worry about building universal support for different (and tedious) platforms like Teams and Zoom. Eager to give the desktop recording sdk a try soon."
- davidgu "Just to clarify, we’re the infra layer that reliably captures and normalizes meeting data across platforms. The real value for users is what developers build on top: automated analysis, enrichment, and workflows (not the capture itself). Modern LLMs can power sales coaching, medical scribing, legal review, support QA, and compliance reporting but they need consistent inputs to process. We handle capture/formatting/edge cases so developers can focus on models and UX."
- ripped_britches "I’m interested in how you expect to keep market share if this capability can be offered by the webrtc service provider. I saw the other comment about multiple providers, but many enterprises have just one preferred path. For example I’ve been recording Google drive calls and the transcript goes straight into my Google drive."
- davidgu "For internal use cases like recording your own meetings into Google Drive, the native tools work fine. Where we come in is for companies building products that need to support all of their customers across Zoom, Meet, Teams, Webex, etc. Most enterprises don’t want five different integrations, and native APIs often come with restrictions (like only the organizer being able to access the file, or recordings not being available until after the call)."
Replicability of Transcription Features
Some users questioned the defensibility of Recall's transcription capabilities, suggesting that open-source models make it easy to replicate. This sparked a debate about the true value proposition.
- orliesaurus "Congrats on ur launch. Amanda has the strongest LinkedIn game I have ever seen in my life. On the other hand the product is IMHO at risk? Models like Whisper, DistilWhisper, TinyLlama, miniGPT-4, OpenHermes, Vosk, and Llama.cpp make Recall.ai meeting transcription easy to replicate. IMHO in 1 weekend you can build an open-source tech stacks that can rival or EVEN surpass the value brought....or am I tripping?"
- dylan604 "Ah yes, the ever popular "over a weekend" retort. So, you have a weekend coming up. I fully expect to see your Show HN on Monday. You'd know pretty quickly on your own if you were tripping or not. I'll check back with you on Monday. I'll gladly eat a bowl of something (I'm thinking ice cream) if you have a working Show HN on Monday. You're welcome!"
Marketing and Branding
The company's marketing approach, specifically the use of physical mailers, and the product's name, were also discussed.
- wferrell "Out of interest, what is the thinking behind sending a physical mailer to what feels like a large fraction of San Francisco? Both why send it and why send it with very little info included on the page?"
- davidgu "Did you get one? :) This was a part of our Series B raise to help get our name out."
- davidgu "The postcards were part of a dev-focused campaign to get people curious enough to check us out. We kept it minimal to stand out amongst other mail."
- nottorp "Is it a good idea to stay named like the spyware that MS has put in Windows 11?"
- moomoo11 "98% of people don’t know. Including me and I am here often."
Historical Context and Company Journey
Users acknowledged Recall's long journey and previous pivots, highlighting their persistence in building essential "schlep tools."
- Hansenq "No but seriously, y'all have built not only an incredible product that I had the chance to demo, but a great company as well, through your previous pivots and cofounder changes. You're building schlep tools that product companies definitely don't want to do, years before it was clear there was a market here, and do it well."
Use Cases and Future Directions
Discussions touched upon specific use cases, such as capturing video frames and handling complex meeting setups with mixed onsite and remote participants, indicating areas for future development.
- aldebran "Related but tangential: is there a way to grab video frames from a meeting? Audio transcript is great. Looking at a use case to grab participant video."
- IMTDb "Our meetings often involve a mix of onsite and offsite employees. Typical setup might be CEO + CTO + a VP in a room, connected as a single zoom client to the call (either of these 3 guys depending on who got in the meeting room first), then few additional people joining remotely from home each on their own zoom instance. The guys on the meeting room are using a dedicated camera in the meeting room that captures the entire room, and has all participants in sight. Is this a setup you are trying to address; how are you able to recognize speakers in this configuration? Most transcript system we have tried bundle everything that is said by the onsite people as a single entity which pretty much destroys the value of the transcript; especially if people in that room disagree with each other; reading the transcript makes it feel that the onsite guys is very schizophrenic."
Hiring and Role Opportunities
A user inquired about potential hiring opportunities within the company, indicating interest in employment.
- shravankumar8 "Hello are you open to hiring for Remote roles ?? am looking for Full stack junior or intern roles and was truely impressed by the product."
Platform Compatibility
A question arose regarding the compatibility of the new SDK with web applications versus desktop-only applications.
- paool "So this wouldn't work in a web app, only a desktop app? I guess that leaves electron and tauri?"