It is Tuesday morning in a Kwun Tong office. Six people are in a management meeting. Two of them are typing notes instead of contributing, and by Friday nobody can agree on what was decided about the supplier contract.
The obvious fix costs about US$10 a person per month. The catch is that the meeting was conducted in Cantonese, and most of the tools you will be recommended cannot transcribe Cantonese at all.
This page sets out what AI meeting notes tools actually cost in 2026, what the published plans include, where the language limit bites, and which option makes sense for which kind of Hong Kong business.
How much do AI meeting notes tools cost in 2026?
The two most widely used tools, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai, both start free and run from roughly US$8 to US$39 per user per month depending on tier and billing cycle. Annual billing is substantially cheaper than monthly on both, and both charge per seat rather than per meeting.
Below are the published plans as of 2026. Prices are per user per month unless stated, in US dollars, and were taken from vendor pricing pages and independent pricing reviews.
Otter.ai published plans
--- Basic: free, capped at 300 transcription minutes per month.
--- Pro: US$16.99 billed monthly, or US$8.33 billed annually.
--- Business: US$30 billed monthly, or US$19.99 billed annually, with a five-seat minimum.
--- Enterprise: custom pricing.
Fireflies.ai published plans
--- Free: US$0.
--- Pro: US$10 per seat on annual billing, US$18 billed monthly.
--- Business: US$19 per seat annual, US$29 billed monthly.
--- Enterprise: US$39 per seat, annual billing only.
--- Additional AI credit packs are charged on top of the seat price.
What does that add up to for a Hong Kong SME?
For a six-person management team on Fireflies Business annual billing, the cost is US$19 x 6 x 12, which is US$1,368 a year, roughly HK$10,700 at an exchange rate of about 7.8. Otter Business annual at its five-seat minimum works out to US$1,199 a year, roughly HK$9,400.
Two things distort that arithmetic in practice.
The first is the seat minimum. Otter's Business tier will not sell you three seats. If your management team is three people, you either pay for five or drop to Pro and lose the admin controls.
The second is the credit pack. Fireflies sells AI credits separately from seats, so a team that leans heavily on summaries and ask-the-transcript features can spend meaningfully more than the headline seat price. Budget the seat price as a floor, not a ceiling.
For reference, HK$10,700 a year is roughly what 248 hours of work costs at Hong Kong's statutory minimum wage of HK$43.1 per hour, which took effect on 1 May 2026. If your team currently spends more than five hours a week between them writing up and chasing meeting notes, the tool pays for itself on time alone.
Can these tools actually handle Cantonese?
Otter.ai transcribes in six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese, and the Chinese it covers is Mandarin. It does not handle Cantonese and does not produce Traditional Chinese output. Fireflies advertises support for more than 100 languages, which is a far broader list, but Cantonese performance still needs to be tested on your own audio before you commit.
This is the single most important line on this page for a Hong Kong buyer, and it is the line that international comparison articles leave out.
The accuracy numbers make the gap clearer. Fireflies states 99% accuracy in English and 95% in other languages. Independent user testing puts Fireflies at 90% to 95% on clean audio and Otter at around 85% in the same conditions. Those are English-language figures. Nobody publishes a Cantonese accuracy figure, which itself tells you something.
Three things make a typical Hong Kong meeting harder than the benchmark:
--- Code-switching. A single sentence may run Cantonese, then an English product name, then a Mandarin figure. Engines trained to detect one language per session handle this badly.
--- Traditional Chinese output. Even where a tool recognises the speech, it may return Simplified characters, which means a manual conversion pass before the notes can be circulated.
--- Room conditions. All of these tools degrade with heavy accents, background noise, or several people talking over each other. That describes most real meetings.
Where the international tools genuinely win
If your meetings run in English, Otter Pro at US$8.33 per user per month on annual billing is excellent value and nothing custom-built will beat it on price. This section exists because a comparison where one side wins every row is an advertisement, not a comparison.
Otter wins on real-time transcription. If you want live captions appearing as the meeting runs, that is its strength.
Fireflies wins on breadth and integration. It covers more meeting platforms, pushes notes into CRM systems on the paid tiers, and its free plan is genuinely usable for testing.
Both win on setup time. You connect a calendar and the bot joins the next call. There is no deployment project, no consultant, and no minimum contract.
Our own view is that any Hong Kong business should run the free tier of both for two weeks, on real meetings, before paying anyone anything. If Fireflies handles your Cantonese acceptably, buy Fireflies. That is the honest answer, and it does not involve us.
What are the limitations you should price in?
Every option on this page has a constraint that only shows up after purchase. These are the ones worth knowing before the card comes out.
--- Free tiers are capped. Otter Basic stops at 300 transcription minutes per month, which is about five hours. Two weekly management meetings will exhaust it.
--- Seat minimums. Otter Business requires five seats. Small teams pay for capacity they do not use.
--- Per-seat pricing scales badly. A tool that costs US$19 for one manager costs US$380 a month for a twenty-person department, whether or not all twenty attend meetings.
--- Credit packs. Fireflies' AI features draw on credits sold separately. Heavy summarisation use is an additional line item.
--- Language coverage is the hard wall. No price tier on Otter unlocks Cantonese. This is a capability limit, not a paywall.
--- Model changes. The transcription and summary quality of these tools depends on AI models that are themselves retired on published schedules. Our guide to AI model deprecation explains why a tool's behaviour can change without you changing anything.
Which option should you choose?
The right answer depends almost entirely on what language your meetings are actually held in, and secondarily on how many people need a seat.
Choose Otter Pro (US$8.33 per user per month, annual) if your meetings are conducted in English, your team is under five people, and you want live captions during the call.
Choose Fireflies Pro or Business (US$10 to US$19 per seat, annual) if you run a mix of languages, need notes pushed into a CRM, or meet across several platforms. Test Cantonese on your own recordings during the free plan first.
Choose a configured setup if your meetings are Cantonese-dominant, you need Traditional Chinese output, and the notes feed something downstream such as a quotation, a case file or a compliance record. This is the scenario off-the-shelf pricing tiers do not solve, because the constraint is capability rather than budget.
That last case is what UD's AI Staff Solution addresses through its admin AI employee role: a setup configured around Cantonese and Traditional Chinese output, and around where the notes need to go afterwards. UD does not publish a standard per-seat price for it, because the scope varies with what the notes have to connect to, so treat the figures on this page as your benchmark and ask for a quote against them rather than the other way round. If you also handle a lot of inbound calls, our explainer on what an AI voice agent is covers the adjacent decision.
Common questions about AI meeting notes pricing
Is there a genuinely free option?
Yes. Fireflies has a free plan at US$0 and Otter has a free Basic plan capped at 300 transcription minutes per month. Both are adequate for testing and inadequate for a team that meets daily.
Is annual billing worth it?
On both tools the annual price is roughly half the monthly price. Otter Pro drops from US$16.99 to US$8.33, and Fireflies Pro from US$18 to US$10. If you are confident after a trial, annual is the obvious choice.
Do I pay per meeting or per person?
Per person. Both tools charge per seat, so cost scales with headcount rather than meeting volume. A team that meets rarely still pays full price for every seat.
Will it handle a meeting that switches between Cantonese and English?
Otter will not, because it does not support Cantonese at all. Fireflies may, given its 100-plus language coverage, but you should verify it on your own recordings rather than trusting the language list.
The verdict
AI meeting notes are one of the cheapest useful things an SME can buy in 2026. Under US$20 a seat per month removes an hour of admin from several people a week, and the published plans are transparent enough to budget from.
The decision is not really about price. It is about language. Run both free tiers on two weeks of your actual meetings, in the actual language your team speaks, and let the transcripts decide. If they are good enough, pay the US$10 and move on. If the Cantonese comes back unusable, you now know exactly what problem you are buying a solution to.
Knowing the price is easy. Knowing whether it works on your meetings takes someone who has sat through them. We understand AI. UD stands with you.
Get a straight answer on your own meetings
If the free trials came back unusable in Cantonese, the next step is scoping what a configured setup would cost against the benchmarks above. We will walk you through it step by step, from testing your real recordings to quoting a solution that fits.
Reviewed by the UD AI team. Prices verified September 2026 against vendor pricing pages and independent pricing reviews; verify current rates before purchase.
