Letterly

Letterly is a voice-to-text app that takes a different angle from traditional meeting assistants. Rather than focusing on meeting intelligence, Letterly is designed to turn spoken thoughts into polished written content. You speak, and the app delivers a well-structured email, note, social media post, journal entry, or to-do list. It is a dictation tool reimagined for the AI era, and it does that job impressively well.

The app has attracted over 300,000 users with its simple premise: tap record, talk, and get polished text back. The 25+ rewrite formats mean you can speak a stream of consciousness and receive a properly formatted email, a concise X post, a structured to-do list, or any number of other output formats. You can even create custom rewrite templates for formats the app doesn’t cover out of the box. For people who think faster than they type, or who want to capture ideas on the go, Letterly is genuinely useful.

Where Letterly falls short is in the meeting-specific features that define true meeting assistants. There is no speaker diarization, no participant identification, no structured meeting summaries with decisions and action items, no real-time coaching, and no cross-meeting knowledge graph. Letterly treats all audio the same: as raw material to be transcribed and rewritten into a chosen format. That is a strength for general voice capture but a limitation for meeting workflows.

Key Features

Letterly supports 90+ languages with automatic language detection, removing the friction of manual language selection. The app offers offline recording, so you can capture audio anywhere, though the AI rewriting step requires an internet connection. Background and screen-off recording let you capture without keeping the app in the foreground. A home screen widget enables one-tap recording for quick capture. The 25+ rewrite options cover common formats like emails, messages, notes, posts, and to-do lists, and custom rewrite templates let you define your own. Tags help organize notes, and cross-device sync keeps everything accessible across iPhone, Android, Mac, and web. Zapier integration allows you to route transcripts into tools like Google Docs and Notion, and custom webhooks provide additional automation flexibility. Recordings can be up to 90 minutes long, though you must record live in the app — Letterly does not support importing pre-recorded audio files.

Pricing

Letterly offers a free trial to get started. Paid plans are $9 per month or $70 per year, with lifetime deals occasionally available through AppSumo (around $69 for single-device access). All paid plans include unlimited recordings (up to 90 minutes each), 27 rewrite options, 90+ language support, and cross-device sync. The pricing is reasonable for a dedicated voice-to-text tool, though it adds up for users who only need occasional transcription.

Privacy & Security

Letterly’s privacy posture is mixed. The app supports offline recording, which means your audio can be captured without an internet connection. However, the AI rewriting and polishing features process your transcript through cloud servers. This means your spoken content is transmitted to external servers for the AI transformation step. Letterly links to a privacy policy on their website, but the details of data retention, processing location, and encryption are not prominently disclosed on the main product page. For casual voice notes and general dictation, this is likely acceptable. For sensitive meeting content, the lack of transparency about cloud processing is a concern compared to fully on-device alternatives.

Best For

Letterly is ideal for individuals who want a fast, easy way to turn spoken thoughts into polished written content. It suits professionals who dictate emails, messages, and notes throughout the day. Content creators who draft social media posts, blog outlines, or journal entries by voice will find the rewrite formats valuable. Multilingual users benefit from the 90+ language support. However, Letterly is not the right choice for teams that need dedicated meeting intelligence, structured meeting summaries, action item tracking, or cross-meeting insights. It is a voice-to-text productivity tool, not a meeting assistant.

How Letterly Compares to Hedy

Letterly and Hedy serve overlapping but fundamentally different use cases. Letterly excels at turning voice into polished written content across many formats. Hedy excels at turning meetings into actionable intelligence.

Letterly’s strength is its simplicity and versatility: speak, and get a formatted email, note, or post. Hedy’s strength is its depth: structured meeting summaries, speaker-attributed action items, real-time coaching, decisions tracking, and a cross-meeting knowledge graph that connects insights across all your conversations.

On privacy, Hedy has a clear advantage. Hedy processes audio entirely on-device using local Whisper models, so your meeting content never leaves your computer. Letterly records offline but sends transcripts to cloud servers for AI processing.

Platform support is comparable: both run on iOS, Android, Mac, and web. Hedy adds Windows support, which Letterly lacks. Both offer offline recording, but Hedy also provides offline transcription through on-device models.

For meeting-specific workflows, Hedy is the clear choice. It understands meetings as structured events with participants, topics, decisions, and action items. Letterly treats all audio as undifferentiated voice input to be transcribed and reformatted. If you need a quick dictation tool for emails and notes, Letterly is excellent. If you need a meeting assistant that makes your meetings more productive and your follow-ups more reliable, Hedy delivers capabilities that Letterly simply does not offer.