Bonfiyah vs Otter: an honest comparison.

Otter has built a meeting-recording empire on a particular default behavior: when you join a Zoom or Teams call with Otter connected, Otter sends "Otter Assistant" — a bot — to that meeting. The bot announces itself, but doesn't ask permission. After the meeting, Otter automatically emails everyone in attendance with a link to the transcript.

For some users, this is a feature. For many — including most attorneys, journalists, and executives I've spoken with — this is the reason they uninstalled.

In 2024, Otter became the subject of a federal class-action lawsuit (Brewer v. Otter.ai, N.D. Cal.) over training AI models on user transcripts without explicit consent. Whether the suit succeeds or settles, the underlying behavior is documented in their own terms of service.

Bonfiyah was built explicitly to take the opposite position:

• No meeting bots, ever. If you record a virtual meeting, Bonfiyah captures it via Mac Catalyst's screen broadcast — the bot would have to be invited by you, deliberately. There is no automatic join.
• No emails to participants without your action. Sharing a transcript or summary requires your explicit tap.
• Built-in two-party consent management. Twelve US states require all parties to consent before a recording. Bonfiyah surfaces this requirement at recording time, lets you mark each speaker's consent status, and sends consent-request SMS messages on your behalf when needed.
• No AI training on your conversations. We commit to this in the privacy policy. We do not, and will not, fine-tune any model on your transcripts.
• Audio deleted after processing. Once we have the transcript, the raw audio is permanently deleted from our servers within 24 hours.

This is not a marketing posture. It's the reason the app exists.