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, you'll find a detailed breakdown here.

I've tested the platform, analyzed dozens of user reviews, and compared it against top alternatives.

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. A bot joins your meeting, records everything, transcribes the conversation in real-time, and 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.

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 is the lack of custom vocabulary options. Teams in biotech, fintech, or specialized fields spend considerable time manually correcting transcripts after every meeting.

Source: G2

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. Manual cleanup is necessary 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. Built-in frameworks include MEDDIC and BANT for sales teams, or you can create your own format using custom prompts.

Verdict: Saves time for getting the gist quickly, but misses nuances and context regularly. Users report having to prompt the AI multiple times to capture all action items correctly. Consider it a smart first draft that needs review rather than a finished product you can trust blindly.

Source: G2

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 combine multiple clips into "Reels" to share highlights with stakeholders without forcing them to watch full recordings.

Verdict: This is one of tl;dv's standout features. Being able to grab exact customer feedback or important decisions and share them instantly proves useful in practice. Users consistently praise this capability, and it works well with no complaints.

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. Much less valuable if you only need occasional meeting notes.

However, users note the analytics lack depth. You get qualitative insights but limited quantitative metrics. Tools like Avoma offer more detailed statistical analysis if you need it.

Source: G2

6. Sales Coaching and Playbooks

For sales teams, 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 differentiates tl;dv if you're managing a sales org. Less relevant for other use cases.

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, adding another tool to your stack. Even the native integrations have problems. Multiple users reported broken or limited HubSpot and Slack integrations, with some giving harsh reviews entirely due to integration failures and poor support.

Source: G2

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: Async collaboration works well. You can't collaborate in real-time during a meeting, but post-meeting sharing and commenting function properly. Useful 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 narrows results.

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.

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.

Where tl;dv Falls Short

Despite an impressive feature set, tl;dv has some notable gaps:

1. No Custom Vocabulary

You cannot add custom terms, product names, or industry jargon to improve transcription accuracy. For teams in biotech, fintech, legal, or healthcare, this means constant manual corrections of technical terms that the AI misunderstands.

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, this becomes a real problem.

3. Virtual Meetings Only

The platform only works with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. In-person meetings, phone calls, and conversations on other platforms like Discord or Slack cannot be captured.

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 functions more as 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

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
• Customer support problems - users report slow, unhelpful responses
• AI summaries miss nuances and require manual review
• 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
• 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.

The free plan offers unlimited meetings, basic AI summaries, and transcription without a credit card. You're capped at 20 AI multi-meeting reports, which heavily restricts conversational intelligence features. You'll outgrow this quickly for anything beyond basic transcription.

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. Read AI comes in at $19.75/month and offers unified search across meetings and emails.

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

The value proposition only makes sense if you specifically need tl;dv's sales coaching features, locked behind the Business plan at $98/month. That's a $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 works well, multi-meeting intelligence delivers value when analyzing dozens of conversations, and the sales coaching tools are sophisticated.

But 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
• Use Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams exclusively
• 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. Char might be worth exploring.
• 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 Char ($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 Char Compares With tl;dv

Char doesn't record meeting video, so it's not a one-to-one tl;dv alternative. But if you're looking for an AI meeting assistant that captures meeting audio to deliver real-time transcription and instant AI summaries, it's worth considering.

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 in your meetings, no client discomfort, no disruption.
• Universal platform support. Works with any meeting software—Zoom, Meet, Teams, Discord, Slack—and captures in-person conversations.
• 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.
• 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 versus tl;dv's $29/month.

Char's note-taking and summary features:

• Familiar notepad interface. Feels like Apple Notes with powerful AI running locally in the background. A true notepad experience rather than 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, 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.
• Multiple export formats. Markdown, PDF, or Rich Text to fit your workflow.

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

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

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