Tactiq and 4 Free AI Note-Takers: What $0 Really Buys Vietnamese Teams

Tactiq takes meeting notes with no bot and saves Google Meet's Vietnamese captions. Here are the real free-plan limits of Tactiq, Fathom, tl;dv, Fireflies and Memobot, and when to skip them.

Tactiq is a Chrome extension that turns what's said in a meeting into text and has AI summarise it, and it does so without sending a bot into the call. For Vietnamese speakers its real value is narrower and more useful: it saves the Vietnamese captions Google Meet already shows and then throws away. If you want to try an AI meeting note-taker for $0, start with Tactiq on Google Meet, add Memobot for all-Vietnamese meetings, and pick Fathom if you want unlimited video recordings.

What is the problem, honestly?

You've heard about "AI meeting notes" for a while and want to try one. You search and find a dozen names: Tactiq, Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv, Otter, Memobot. Every one of them says "Free".

Then you hit three walls:

• You can't tell which ones understand Vietnamese. The homepage says "100+ languages", and whether Vietnamese is one of them is buried in a help article.
• The bot is awkward. Most tools send a virtual "attendee" into the call. Your client sees a strange name and the room tightens up.
• "Free" doesn't say how free. Three meetings in, the tool locks, right when you've started to rely on it.

This post answers those three things. I checked each vendor's official pricing and help pages on 1 October 2026.

What is Tactiq, in plain English?

Picture someone sitting beside you in a meeting, quietly copying down every caption that scrolls across the screen. Nobody else in the room can see them. When the meeting ends, they hand you a transcript and a summary.

Tactiq is that person, in the form of an extension (a small add-on for the Chrome or Edge browser). It runs inside your own meeting tab on Google Meet, Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

It's built by Tactiq HQ in Sydney, Australia. The Chrome Web Store listing shows over 1,000,000 users and a 4.8/5 rating from about 4,400 reviews. So what: this isn't an obscure add-on you'd be gambling on.

Tactiq shows the transcript beside the call, with speaker names and a language switch. No bot appears in the participant list. (Source: Chrome Web Store)

Why does Tactiq work differently from the rest?

Meeting note-takers come in two schools.

The bot school. Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv and Memobot send a virtual account into the call. The bot captures the audio, ships it to the vendor's servers, and runs it through their own speech-recognition engine. You get an audio or video file to replay.

The caption-reading school. Tactiq doesn't record audio. It reads the captions that Google Meet, Zoom or Teams generate themselves, and saves them as a transcript. Tactiq's own material describes it that way: it automatically saves the meeting's generated captions as a transcript.

This matters to Vietnamese speakers for one specific reason. As I covered in Vietnamese Meeting Notes: Google Meet Won't Save Them, Google Meet's live captions do support Vietnamese, and they vanish when the call ends. The features that save anything (Transcripts, Gemini's "Take notes for me") support only 8 languages, and Vietnamese isn't one.

Tactiq fills exactly that gap. Its help centre lists Vietnamese for all three platforms: Google Meet, Zoom and Teams. So what: you get a Vietnamese transcript without buying a pricier Google Workspace plan and without inviting a bot.

⚠️ The flip side: Tactiq is exactly as accurate as the platform's captions. Whatever Google Meet's captions get wrong, your transcript gets wrong. And with no audio file, you can't replay the moment to check.

What do you actually get?

• Nobody sees you taking notes. No strange name in the participant list, so a client call stays natural. (Asking permission is still on you. See "What it costs you".)
• A Vietnamese transcript out of Google Meet. The thing Google won't save now sits in your account, with speaker names and timestamps.
• A summary and action items in one click. After the call, AI pulls out the key points and to-dos, so the recap email takes minutes instead of a rewrite from memory.
• Ask the transcript. Type "what budget did the client agree to?" and the AI answers from the meeting, so you don't scroll line by line.
• Send it elsewhere. Transcripts export to Google Docs, Notion and Slack, so the notes land in the workflow your team already has instead of dying in a new app.

AI summaries are what spend "AI credits". The free plan includes 5 credits a month. (Source: Chrome Web Store)

What does it cost you?

Money. Tactiq's Free plan gives 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month. One credit is one AI action (a summary, a question). Pro unlocks unlimited transcripts and still includes only 10 AI credits. Unlimited AI starts at the Team plan. Prices are shown per country: in Canada I saw Pro at CA$10.75 and Team at CA$22.42 per user per month on annual billing, and reviews quote about $8 and $16.67 in USD.

Quality rides on the captions. Heavy regional accents, a weak microphone, two people talking over each other: when the captions slip, so does the transcript. Independent reviews consistently flag this.

One language at a time. Tactiq transcribes the language you select and doesn't switch when the speaker does. In a half-Vietnamese, half-English meeting, the English stretches come out mangled.

Desktop only. You need to join from Chrome or Edge. On Zoom you join through the web client (or use Tactiq's Mac app), and the host has to enable "Automated captions". Joining from a phone doesn't work.

Consent is still your job. No bot means nobody is notified that the meeting is being captured. Say one sentence at the start. With clients that's manners. In many places it's also the law.

⚠️ The free plan's value runs out at meeting number six in a month: you still get text, and the AI summary stops until the month rolls over. If you meet daily, Free is enough to evaluate and not enough to live on.

What does $0 buy you in each tool?

This section is for people who want to try before paying anything.

What free plans squeeze is almost always the AI summary, not the transcript. Note: tl;dv's pricing page says "10 meetings with AI notes" without stating whether that is monthly or one-time. (Chart drawn by the author from each vendor's official pricing page, 1 Oct 2026)

Three things the table shows:

1. Nearly everyone records for free, and everyone squeezes the AI. The transcript is the bait. The summary is the product. So what: when comparing free plans, count summaries, not minutes.

2. The feature Vietnamese teams need most usually sits in the expensive tier. Meetings that mix in English need multi-language handling inside one call. At Fireflies that's the Business plan, at tl;dv it's Pro. The free tier only lets you test the single-language case.

3. Memobot is the only option priced in dong. 90 free minutes is thin, and it is built for Vietnamese across all three regions, with a paid plan far cheaper than the international tools.

The bot school looks like this: a bot records the whole call and pushes notes into other tools. The trade is that everyone in the room sees it. (Source: tl;dv)

When should you use Tactiq?

• You meet on Google Meet in Vietnamese and only need a transcript plus a summary. This is where Tactiq wins most clearly.
• Your clients or partners bristle at bots. No strange name in the room.
• Your company blocks outside bots from meetings and allows approved extensions.
• You have fewer than 10 meetings a month and want something free for the long run, not a two-week trial.

When should you NOT use Tactiq?

• You need to replay the meeting. Tactiq keeps no audio or video. Use Fathom: recording and storage are free and unlimited.
• The meeting flips between Vietnamese and English constantly. Tactiq follows one language. Try Fireflies Business (Multi-language Mode) or tl;dv Pro, and accept that you'll pay.
• You join from a phone, or the meeting is in person. The extension doesn't run there. Memobot has iOS and Android apps for recording on the spot.
• A high-stakes meeting where the text has to be as accurate as possible. Live captions always trail after-the-fact processing. Record the audio (with permission) and run it through a strong speech-to-text engine, as I compared in the earlier post.
• Sensitive meetings (pay, discipline, legal). The content still goes to a third party's servers for the AI summary. Take notes by hand.

The verdict: where should a Vietnamese user start?

• Try first: Tactiq, if you meet on Google Meet from a computer. Two minutes to install, no bot, Vietnamese supported, 10 meetings a month free.
• Try alongside it: Memobot, if the meeting is all Vietnamese. Spend the 90 free minutes on one real meeting and compare the text quality against Tactiq.
• Pick Fathom if you want video to rewatch and don't mind the bot.
• Skip Otter and Gemini's "Take notes for me" for Vietnamese meetings: neither supports the language.
• Don't pay in month one. Run the same real meeting through two tools and count the errors in names and numbers. Upgrade only the one that actually stops you taking notes by hand.

I haven't measured each tool's Vietnamese accuracy on your voice, and no independent ranking does that yet. The numbers in this post are plan limits published by the vendors, not quality scores.

FAQ

Is Tactiq really free? Yes. The Free plan needs no card and gives 10 transcripts and 5 AI credits a month. When credits run out, transcription keeps working and only the AI summary pauses until next month.

Does Tactiq handle Vietnamese? Yes. Tactiq's help centre lists Vietnamese for Google Meet, Zoom and Teams. You have to select Vietnamese as the transcription language, and it captures one language at a time.

With no bot, do other people know I'm capturing the meeting? No. That's why you should say so up front. The tool won't announce it for you.

Does a 3 to 5 person team need to pay? Not in the first month. Each person on their own free plan is enough to learn whether the team actually rereads the notes. If nobody does, paying won't fix it.

What do I lose by doing nothing? Half an hour to an hour of write-up after each meeting, or the "who promised what" details altogether. At one or two meetings a month, that's an acceptable price.

References

• Tactiq: AI note taker for Google Meet, Zoom and MS Teams, Chrome Web Store
• Tactiq Pricing, Tactiq
• What Languages does Tactiq Support?, Tactiq Help
• How to use Tactiq with Zoom, Tactiq Help
• How to record captions in Google Meet, Tactiq
• Fireflies Pricing and Free plan features, Fireflies
• Fathom: Free vs. Premium and Supported languages, Fathom Help
• tl;dv Pricing, tl;dv
• Memobot, VAIS
• Supported languages for Google Workspace with Gemini, Google Meet Help
• Tactiq Pricing 2026, MeetGeek (USD price points)

#Tactiq #AIMeetingNotes #GoogleMeet #Vietnamese #Fathom #Memobot #Fireflies

✍️ The Author: Do Ngoc Hoan Founder of CookConnects.ca & Wizy.ca. Bridging the gap between advanced algorithms and business execution. I write for technical founders looking to scale their impact with AI and robust engineering.

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