Wispr Flow made its name as a dictation app: talk, and it types your words into whatever you're working on. This week it launched its first product beyond that, called Notetaker, a tool that records meetings and turns them into transcripts, summaries, and action items.
The launch says a lot about where the dictation company sees its future. Days after the launch, Wispr raised 280 million dollars in new funding, valuing the company at 2 billion dollars, more than double where it stood earlier this year.
Notetaker works differently than the meeting bots many people already know. Instead of joining your Zoom or Teams call as a visible participant with its own name tag, it records audio straight from your computer in the background. Wispr's own product notes describe it as a tool with no integrations to set up and no bot to invite, capturing whatever your computer plays.
That design is not unique to Wispr. Its closest rival, Granola, works the same way, and Granola is currently being sued over exactly this. A proposed class action filed in a California federal court in July argues that recording people without a visible signal violates wiretapping law, and the case joins similar lawsuits already filed against two other well known meeting tools, Otter.ai and Fireflies.ai.
The legal question at the center of all three cases is simple: if a tool records a call without announcing itself, did everyone on that call actually agree to being recorded? Eleven states, including California, Illinois, and Pennsylvania, require every person on a call to consent before it can be recorded, not just the person running the software.
This matters more than it looks like on the surface. A visible meeting bot at least gives people a chance to object or leave. A tool that records silently from someone's laptop removes that moment entirely, and the responsibility for telling everyone on the call shifts entirely onto the person running the app. Wispr's own FAQ says exactly this: it puts the burden of informing every participant back on the user, not the software.
None of this means these tools are illegal, and no court has ruled against Granola, Otter, or Fireflies yet. But the pattern is now common enough across three separate companies that it looks like an industry habit rather than one company's mistake.
If your team is adopting any meeting recorder, silent or not, the smart move is building a one line habit: say out loud, at the start of every call, that it's being recorded. That costs nothing and closes the exact gap these lawsuits are built around. The bigger business story here is that transcription is becoming a real market on its own, not just a side feature bundled into video calling software, and companies chasing that market are moving faster than the legal rules meant to govern it.