I Tested tl;dv So You Don't Have To [2025 Review]

If you're considering tl;dv to handle your meeting notes and summaries automatically, and want to know whether it lives up to the hype, you're in the right place. 

I've tested the platform, analyzed dozens of user reviews, and compared it against top alternatives to give you a complete picture. Here's everything you need to know.

What Is tl;dv and How Does It Work?

tl;dv (yes, lowercase, it stands for "too long; didn't view") is a cloud-based AI note-taker designed primarily for virtual meetings on Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. The basic idea is simple: a bot joins your meeting, records everything, transcribes the conversation in real-time, and then generates AI summaries once the call ends.

The platform has attracted over 2 million users worldwide, including teams at Fortune 500 companies like Cloudflare, Forbes, and Salesforce. It's particularly popular among sales and customer success teams who need to track conversations, coach reps, and push insights into their CRMs.

The key thing to understand: tl;dv is entirely cloud-based and bot-dependent. Your data goes to their servers for processing, then to Anthropic (their AI partner) for generating summaries and insights. This architecture shapes both its strengths and limitations.

tl;dv’s Top Features and My Verdict on Them

1. Real-Time Transcription

tl;dv delivers live transcription as people speak during meetings. The claimed accuracy is 96% for clear English audio, and you can watch the transcript appear in real-time. 

After the meeting, you get a full searchable transcript with timestamps. The transcription supports 30+ languages including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Korean.

Verdict: Works well for native English speakers with good audio quality. But struggles significantly with accents—particularly Indian English and mixed vernacular conversations—and completely falls apart with technical jargon. 

The biggest problem? No custom vocabulary option, so teams in biotech, fintech, or specialized fields will spend considerable time manually correcting transcripts after every meeting.

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2. Automatic Speaker Recognition

The platform automatically identifies who's speaking and labels them in the transcript. You can rename speakers afterward to keep things organized.

Verdict: Works great for one-on-one calls or structured meetings where people take turns. Falls apart when multiple people talk quickly, interrupt, or overlap. Expect manual cleanup for fast-paced team discussions.

3. AI Summaries with Custom Templates

After each meeting, tl;dv generates an AI summary that includes key discussion points, action items, decisions made, and next steps. 

You can customize these summaries using templates. They offer built-in frameworks like MEDDIC and BANT for sales teams, or you can create your own format using custom prompts.

Verdict: Genuinely time-saving and helpful for getting the gist quickly. But they miss nuances and context regularly. 

Users report having to prompt the AI multiple times to capture all action items correctly. Think of it as a smart first draft that needs review, not a finished product you can trust blindly.

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4. Clip Creation and Video Highlights

You can highlight any part of the transcript and instantly generate a short video clip of that exact moment. You can even combine multiple clips into "Reels" to give stakeholders the highlights without forcing them to watch full recordings.

Verdict: This is genuinely one of tl;dv's standout features. Being able to grab exact customer feedback or important decisions and share them instantly is incredibly useful. Users consistently praise this capability, and it's executed well—no complaints here.

5. Multi-Meeting Conversational Intelligence

You can ask questions across multiple meetings, track topics automatically with keyword alerts, analyze sentiment, get automated weekly reports of trends, and evaluate sales performance with coaching scorecards.

Verdict: Powerful for sales managers, CS leaders, and product people who need insights from many customer conversations. Way less valuable if you just need occasional meeting notes. 

However, users note the analytics lack depth. You get qualitative insights but limited quantitative metrics. If you need detailed statistical analysis, you'll find tools like Avoma more useful.

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6. Sales Coaching and Playbooks

For sales teams specifically, tl;dv offers coaching features that evaluate how well reps follow your methodology. You can compare actual responses against ideal rebuttals, track which reps need coaching, and identify performance patterns. The platform includes frameworks like BANT and MEDDIC built-in.

Verdict: Well-designed for sales teams that want to scale coaching across reps. This is genuinely a differentiator if you're managing a sales org. Less relevant for other use cases, obviously.

7. Integrations

tl;dv integrates with major CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot. You can map your AI summary template to CRM fields, and the system will automatically update records after calls. The platform claims integration with 6,000+ tools via Zapier.

Verdict: The 6,000+ number is misleading—most require Zapier, which adds another tool to your stack. Even the native integrations have problems. 

Multiple users specifically complained about broken or limited HubSpot and Slack integrations, with some giving harsh reviews entirely due to integration failures and poor support. The integrations exist, but the quality is inconsistent.

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8. Collaboration Features

You can comment on specific meeting moments, tag teammates, share clips and highlights, and auto-share summaries to team channels. The platform also lets you take manual notes with timestamps during or after calls.

Verdict: Solid async collaboration features. You can't collaborate in real-time during a meeting, but post-meeting sharing and commenting work well. Good for distributed teams that need to circulate insights after calls.

9. Search and Discovery

Keyword search across all your transcripts makes it easy to find past discussions. You can search by speaker, topic, or specific phrases, then jump directly to relevant moments. Filtering by domain, date, and meeting status helps narrow things down.

Verdict: The search functionality is hit or miss. While it works for straightforward keyword matches, it sometimes returns meetings that don't actually contain the searched keywords, which defeats the purpose entirely. 

10. Download and Export

On the Pro plan, you get unlimited downloads of meetings as .mp4 video files. You can download full recordings or just clips, then upload them to other platforms or save them to internal storage.

Verdict: Works as advertised. Being able to grab recordings offline or move them to your own storage is useful. The catch is it requires the Pro plan. Free users face a 3+ day wait to access older videos, which is frustrating if you need to reference something quickly.

Where tl;dv Falls Short?

Despite an impressive feature set, tl;dv has some notable gaps that become frustrating in daily use:

1. No Custom Vocabulary

You cannot add custom terms, product names, or industry jargon to improve transcription accuracy. 

For teams in specialized fields, like, biotech, fintech, legal, healthcare, this means constant manual corrections of technical terms that the AI misunderstands. It's 2025, and custom vocabulary should be table stakes.

2. No Offline Capability

tl;dv is entirely cloud-dependent. No internet means no recording, no transcription, no access to past meetings. If you travel frequently or work in areas with spotty connectivity, tl;dv won't accommodate you.

3. Virtual Meetings Only

The platform only works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. In-person meetings, phone calls, conversations on other platforms like Discord or Slack, none of these can be captured. This is a significant limitation if your work involves diverse meeting types.

4. No Seamless Manual Note-Taking Experience

While you can add timestamped notes, there's no true notepad experience where you can actively type alongside live transcription in a unified interface. It's more of an annotation tool than an integrated note-taking workspace.

tl;dv Pros and Cons

Pros

• Excellent clip creation feature for sharing specific moments

• Multi-meeting insights valuable for sales and CS teams

• Good sales coaching features with playbook tracking

• Strong CRM integration for automating post-call admin work

• Custom summary templates let you control output format

• Competitive pricing compared to expensive tools like Gong (especially if you’re looking for meeting intelligence)

Cons

• Bot-based approach creates friction with privacy-conscious clients

• Free plan limitations - 3+ day wait to access older videos

• UI has a learning curve - not immediately intuitive

• Customer support problems - users report slow, unhelpful responses

• AI summaries miss nuances - can often be brief and require manual review to catch everything

• No custom vocabulary for technical or specialized terms

• Speaker identification fails with overlapping or fast-paced conversation

• Integration quality issues - HubSpot and Slack specifically called out

• Cloud dependency - no offline capability whatsoever

• Platform limited to Zoom, Meet, and Teams

How Much Does tl;dv Cost?

tl;dv operates on a freemium model with four tiers: Free Forever ($0), Pro ($29/seat/month), Business ($98/seat/month), and custom Enterprise pricing.

Here’s what I think about it: 

• The free plan is genuinely generous—unlimited meetings, basic AI summaries, and transcription without a credit card. But you're capped at 20 AI multi-meeting reports, which means the conversational intelligence features are heavily restricted. For anything beyond basic transcription, you'll outgrow this quickly.

• Here's the problem: Pro at $29/month is expensive compared to the competition. Fireflies offers similar multi-meeting insights at $18/month. Otter charges $16.99/month. MeetGeek and Avoma both start at $19/month with comparable analytics. Even Read AI, which offers unified search across meetings and emails, comes in at $19.75/month.

If you're just looking for meeting highlights and basic video clips, you're definitely overpaying. 

• The value proposition only makes sense if you specifically need tl;dv's sales coaching features, which are locked behind the Business plan at $98/month. That's a steep $69/month jump from Pro. 

• Enterprise offers custom pricing for organizations needing privately hosted AI, advanced security, and dedicated support.

Final Verdict: Is tl;dv Worth It?

tl;dv is a capable meeting assistant with genuinely useful features—particularly for sales and customer success teams. The clip creation is excellent, the multi-meeting intelligence delivers value if you're analyzing dozens of conversations, and the sales coaching tools are sophisticated enough to justify consideration.

But here's the reality: tl;dv is priced at a premium without offering premium features until you hit the expensive Business tier.

Choose tl;dv if you:

• Run a sales or CS team that specifically needs coaching scorecards and playbook monitoring (and can justify $98/user/month)

• Use Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams exclusively and don't need other platforms

• Are comfortable with cloud tools, bot-based recording, and data leaving your device

• Speak standard English without heavy accents and don't work in technical fields requiring custom vocabulary

• Don't need offline capability or in-person meeting capture

Look elsewhere if you:

• Work in healthcare, legal, finance, or other privacy-sensitive fields where bot visibility and cloud processing create compliance issues. You might want to look at Hyprnote instead. 

• Need to capture in-person meetings, use diverse platforms beyond the big three, or require offline functionality. 

• Want better value—at $29/month for Pro, you're paying 50-70% more than competitors like Hyprnote ($8), Fireflies ($18), Otter ($16.99), or MeetGeek ($19) for similar conversation intelligence

• Work in technical fields needing custom vocabulary or have multilingual teams with strong accents

• Just need basic transcription and highlights—Fathom offers this completely free

How Hyprnote Compares With tl;dv?

Right off the bat, Hyprnote may not be a one-to-one tl;dv alternative because it doesn’t record meeting video. 

But if you’re looking for an AI meeting assistant that captures meeting audio to deliver real-time transcription and instant AI summaries, Hyprnote is definitely worth taking a look at. Here’s why: 

Core advantages over tl;dv:

• Local-first privacy. Everything processes on your device using on-device AI models. Your conversations never touch the cloud unless you explicitly connect an external LLM provider of your choice.

• Bot-free recording. Captures system audio and microphone directly. No visible bot joining your meetings, no client discomfort, no disruption to conversation flow.

• Universal platform support. Works with any meeting software—Zoom, Meet, Teams, Discord, Slack—and captures in-person conversations. Not limited to just three platforms.

• Offline capability. Record, transcribe, and summarize meetings anywhere without internet. Perfect for travel, secure environments, or unreliable connectivity.

• No vendor lock-in. Choose your own AI providers—OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, or custom endpoints. Switch anytime.

• Open source. Inspect the code, audit security, and customize for your organization's needs.

• Better pricing. Core features including unlimited transcription and AI summaries are free forever. Pro is only $8/month (vs. tl;dv's $29/month).

Hyprnote's note-taking and summary features:

• Familiar notepad interface. Feels like Apple Notes with powerful AI running locally in the background. True notepad experience, not just an annotation tool.

• Custom templates for any meeting type. Tailored formats for therapy sessions, legal consultations, sales calls, team standups, or casual conversations.

• Real-time transcription. Live captions appear as people speak, just like tl;dv, but without sending data to the cloud.

• AI chat for instant answers. Ask "What did Sarah say about the budget?" or "List all action items from this week" and get immediate responses.

• Control over AI involvement. Choose how much AI restructures your notes—from minimal touch-ups to complete reformatting.

• Source verification. Hover over any AI-generated summary point to see the exact transcript quote. No hallucinations, no guessing.

• Multiple export formats. Markdown, PDF, or Rich Text to fit your existing workflow.

Bottom line: If you're a sales team needing video recording and coaching features, tl;dv makes more sense. 

But if privacy matters, you need bot-free recording, or you want offline capability, Hyprnote delivers better value at a fraction of the cost while keeping your data completely under your control.

Download Hyprnote for macOS or explore our full comparison of AI meeting summary tools to see how other alternatives stack up.