An AI assistant for work calls that helps during the call, not after it

Two different classes of AI show up in meetings now, and people mix them up constantly. Which one you actually need decides everything else.

AI note-taker vs AI teleprompter: two different tools

A note-taker (Otter, Fireflies, Read AI, the assistants built into Zoom, Teams and Meet) works after the meeting. It transcribes, then sends a summary with decisions and action items. Usually it joins the call as a separate bot participant, and what it produces belongs to the whole team.

A teleprompter works during the meeting. It listens to the conversation on your own computer and shows you a ready phrasing while you are still speaking. It never joins as a participant, because it is listening to the audio on your machine instead of the meeting platform.

Honestly: if what you need is minutes, a decision log and follow-ups, get a note-taker. A teleprompter does none of that and should not try. It earns its place where the cost of a mistake sits inside the sentence you are saying right now.

How a live AI meeting assistant actually works

The app hears two streams: the other person through your system audio, and you through your microphone. Speech becomes text on screen, and on a hotkey the AI returns a short hint on a transparent overlay above your windows. You read it and say it in your own words.

Only you see the hints. The overlay stays out of a browser screen share, which covers sharing a tab, a window or your whole screen from the browser. In native desktop clients on macOS 14 and below it is excluded from the capture too. On Windows it is excluded from capture at the system level for most paths, though not for every capture method or remote desktop. Where the system captures the screen as a whole, for example a local screen recording or a native conference client on macOS 15 and up, the capture can show the overlay. For those cases the hint goes to the phone companion instead, which is not in frame. The full visibility map by client and OS is a separate page.

Seven work calls where a hint in the moment pays for itself

Standups and status calls

Forty minutes of conversation that has nothing to do with you, then suddenly: "and where are we on the integration?" The teleprompter has been holding the tail of the discussion and, on a keypress, builds a coherent answer grounded in what was already said. You do not open with "sorry, could you repeat the question".

Webinars and live Q&A

You prepared the talk. You did not prepare the questions. A hint gives you the skeleton of an answer in a couple of seconds: the claim, the argument, the honest caveat. That is enough to avoid freezing live in front of a hundred people.

Client calls and product demos

"Your competitor is cheaper" lands, or a question about a clause in the contract. Improvising here costs money. Paste the agreed terms into the context field before the call, and the hint leans on those terms rather than on whatever you improvise under pressure. Check the wording before you commit to it out loud.

Calls in a language that is not your first

The word leaves your head mid-sentence, and the other side is fast and heavily accented. Seeing their speech as text on screen removes half the problem, and the hint removes the other half. Recognition covers English and Russian, on two channels, the other person and you separately. We went through this in detail on the English-language interview page.

Cross-functional calls full of somebody else's jargon

Legal, security and finance in one room. Half the vocabulary belongs to a field that is not yours. The speech runs in front of you as text, and on a keypress you get an answer built on what was just said. You stay in the conversation instead of quietly googling a term in another window.

The call where you are the customer

Your bank, your insurer, a contractor, a vendor's support team. Twenty minutes in which you have to ask the right questions, or the next slot is a month away. Press the key and the hint suggests the questions you have not asked yet, while there is still time to ask them.

One boundary right away: this is about business calls. A doctor's appointment, a therapy session, a family lawyer are not on this list. Those conversations are personal, and an AI assistant has no business being in them.

The day you are simply not on form

Sick, short on sleep, third call in a row. This is not about being clever, it is insurance: a second opinion within reach for the moment the thought slips away.

Where an AI teleprompter does not help

• In-person conversations. The tool is built for calls: one channel is the other person through system audio, the other is you through the microphone. In a room both voices land in the same microphone and merge into one speaker as far as the app is concerned. A meeting room, an office, coffee with a client are not its scenario.
• When listening matters more than answering. If you read a whole hint in the middle of someone else's sentence, you lose the thread. The working rule is a short glance in a pause, not reading aloud off the screen.
• It does not replace knowing your subject. A teleprompter pulls out the phrasing you already know but cannot retrieve in two seconds. If the knowledge is not there, there is nothing to retrieve.

It is not a recording, but you still have to say something

Vizir does not create a recording. No audio or video file of the meeting appears on your machine or on ours: speech lives for seconds in memory along the path sound to recognition to text. There is no archive you can come back to in six months.

That is a real difference from a voice recorder and from note-takers, and it removes the heaviest questions. Nothing to store, nothing to forward, nothing to attach to a dispute. Most of the fear around "I am being recorded" is fear of the file.

But one difference runs the other way. To turn speech into text, the app sends it in real time to a third-party cloud speech-to-text provider. The text then goes to a second outside party, the AI model provider that composes the hint. There are two external processors in the chain, and the second one receives not your voice but the substance of the conversation. What each of them receives is described on the privacy page.

Hence the rule worth keeping in mind: no recording does not mean nothing is happening. The conversation is processed in the moment, and the decision to send it to the cloud is yours.

After that it becomes a legal question, and the law differs by country far more than people expect. In some places it is enough that you are a participant in the conversation. In others every participant has to agree. And in plenty of places what matters is not whether a file was saved but who else received the content, and here the content does reach two outside services in real time. We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice: check the law where you are and your own company's policy before you use anything like this. If the call touches money, personal data or someone else's confidential information, check twice.

How to tell people, and in what words

One sentence at the start of the meeting removes the main complaint, which is that nobody knew, and it costs ten seconds. It does not replace your employer's permission and it does not cancel an NDA, but it closes the argument you are most likely to have. The problem is usually not willingness to say it, it is not knowing how. Here is wording you can copy.

Out loud at the top of the call:

Heads up, I use an AI assistant. It transcribes speech in real time through a cloud service and suggests phrasing to me. I am not recording the call and the assistant keeps no file.

In the meeting chat, so there is a trace:

Everyone, I have an AI assistant running. It transcribes speech in real time and suggests phrasing to me. I am not recording anything and the assistant saves no file, but the audio does pass through a third-party cloud transcription service. If anyone is uncomfortable with that, say so and I will turn it off.

In the invite for an external call:

On this call I will be using an AI assistant for real-time transcription. I will not be recording the call and the assistant creates no file; transcription is handled by a third-party cloud service.

Why this is in your own interest rather than a lecture:

• NDAs and internal policy. The question an NDA usually turns on is not whether a file exists but who else got to see the content, and cloud transcription and AI providers are outside parties even when they store nothing. Read your own NDA, they differ.
• Your employer can simply ban it. Third-party services can be prohibited by ordinary internal policy or a clause in your contract, with no trade secrets involved at all. Reading that clause is cheaper than explaining yourself later.
• The most likely consequence is at work. The argument you will actually have is with your manager, not with a lawyer. Written permission costs far less than that argument.
• The platform's stance counts as an answer. If third-party note-taker bots are blocked in your Teams tenant, your employer has already spoken: outside AI is not welcome in meetings here. Treat that as the answer to your question and ask in writing.
• Trust. Warn people and there is no awkward conversation later. Stay quiet and the fact will look worse when it surfaces than it actually is.

And two things not to do. Do not run it in conversations you are not part of: leaving a laptop open in a meeting room and walking out is a completely different story, legally and as a human being. And do not run it where the topic is obviously personal. Separately, if there are participants from other countries on the call, warn them without exception. In many places "there is no file" is not the point at all, because what matters is who else received the content.

Job interviews are their own topic, with their own rules and their own ethics, and this article is not about them.

Checklist before the call

• You have read what your contract and your company's policy say about third-party services.
• You said in one sentence at the start that you use an AI assistant and that speech goes through a cloud service.
• You repeated it in the chat if the meeting is external or high-stakes.
• You checked that the topic is work, not personal.
• You ran a test call in advance, not a minute before the negotiation.
• You made a deal with yourself to glance at the hint in a pause, not on top of someone else's sentence.

A teleprompter does not make you smarter and is not supposed to. It makes the right thought available in the second you need it, instead of half an hour after the meeting ends. You can try it on your own calls with a free trial, no card required.