ConversationPilot vs Hedy: continuous live coaching vs a low-cost personal meeting coach

Quick comparison

Hedy and ConversationPilot share a starting premise that sets both apart from most AI notetakers: no bot joins the meeting, the other side sees no extra participant, and the help is shown to you, on your own screen, while the conversation is still happening. From there they head in different directions.

Hedy is a personal productivity tool. It is built by a small company in Portland, Oregon (Tracxn lists three employees and no outside funding), priced for individuals, and runs almost everywhere, including a phone in your pocket for in-person meetings and an Apple Watch. Its real-time layer is a stream of suggestions that arrive every couple of minutes as chat messages, and its strongest work is arguably after the session: recap, notes, highlights, to-dos and a cross-session memory called Topics.

ConversationPilot is a live coach on your side of the call, private to you and transparent to everyone else: no bot joins, no audio is stored, and your calls are never used to train a model. It is narrower on purpose. It runs as a desktop app on macOS and Windows or in the browser, it is tuned for four kinds of conversation (sales, recruitment from the interviewer's side, customer success and fundraising), and its coaching is continuous rather than periodic: cards for the next question, the objection just raised, a buying or candidate signal, and a qualification score that updates as you talk. It then writes a post-call report and gives the call a score.

• Hedy: individual-priced, six platforms, periodic suggestions, strong post-session notes, on-device transcription
• ConversationPilot: desktop and web, continuous coaching cards, post-call report and score, team and manager plans
• Both: no bot joins the call, help appears on your screen only
• Different buyers: a person who wants an affordable all-round meeting coach versus a person or team whose calls have money or a hire riding on them

Who each tool is for

Hedy's homepage lists business professionals, recruiters and hiring managers, coaches and mentors, journalists, students, job seekers, non-native speakers and even patients at medical appointments. Its 13 session types reflect that breadth: Business Meetings, Coaching and Mentoring, Lectures and Webinars, Medical Consultation, Journalism, Solo Brainstorm, Personal Conversation, Job Interview (Candidate), Recruitment, Negotiation, Sales Meeting, Group Brainstorm and Spiritual Teaching. The Sales Meeting mode, added on 30 June 2026, is explicitly for "the person doing the selling" with, in Hedy's words, no CRM to set up. Hedy for Teams exists only as a preview with a waitlist and no published pricing, and the company says it is not a tool for managers to monitor employees.

ConversationPilot is built for people whose calls decide revenue or hires: account executives, SDRs, recruiters and hiring managers, customer success managers and founders raising money. The Solo plan covers an individual and includes CRM sync; Team and Manager plans add seats, a manager dashboard, leaderboards, a call review library, required playbooks and compliance tracking. If you are a lecturer, a journalist or a patient, Hedy is simply the better-shaped tool. If you run a sales or recruiting function and want coaching that is consistent across the team, ConversationPilot is the one with a team layer that exists today.

Real-time coaching: periodic suggestions vs continuous cards

Both tools coach during the call, but the cadence is different enough to change how they feel in use.

Hedy's live feature is called Automatic Suggestions. According to Hedy's own help centre it "fires every couple of minutes", typically begins after about two minutes of meaningful conversation, and arrives as a message in the chat interface, optionally as a system notification or on your Apple Watch. You can set the frequency to Selective, Balanced, Frequent or Off, and you can type questions to Hedy mid-conversation. There is a hard per-session cap: free accounts get automatic suggestions for the first 30 minutes of a session, Pro accounts for 120 minutes. The Sales Meeting mode adds specific nudges for a discovery gap, an unanswered objection, a buying signal, talk ratio and a missing next step; the Recruitment mode offers Suggestion, Blind Spot and Talking Point prompts.

ConversationPilot is designed around continuous coaching. Rather than a periodic chat message, it shows glanceable cards as the conversation moves, typically within two seconds: a suggested next question, a way to handle the objection that was just raised, a buying or candidate signal, and a qualification scorecard that fills in live. Paid plans are limited by coached calls per month rather than by minutes within a call: Solo includes 100 coached calls a month, and Team and Manager are unlimited. After the call both tools produce notes, but ConversationPilot adds a numeric call score and a structured report tuned to the mode you were in, while Hedy's Sales Meeting mode gives talk-to-listen ratio, longest monologue, question count, a Qualification Snapshot and a suggested follow-up email. We found no numeric call score in Hedy's materials.

• Hedy: suggestions every couple of minutes, capped at 30 min (Free) or 120 min (Pro) per session, delivered as chat messages
• ConversationPilot: continuous coaching cards and a live scorecard for the whole call; limits are per month (100 calls on Solo, unlimited on Team and Manager), not per session
• Hedy post-session: recap, notes, highlights, to-dos, Topics memory; sales mode adds talk metrics and a follow-up email
• ConversationPilot post-call: report plus a call score, tuned to sales, recruitment, CS or fundraising

How each tool captures audio

Neither product uses a meeting bot, and both are clear about it. On desktop, both capture system audio so they hear everyone on the call. Hedy states that on macOS it uses the CoreAudio process tap (which is why it requires macOS 14.2 Sonoma or later) and on Windows it uses WASAPI loopback; no participant appears and nothing lands in the meeting chat. Since 14 August 2026 Hedy's desktop apps also watch for a call starting in Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Webex or FaceTime and offer to start a session.

ConversationPilot's desktop app for macOS and Windows captures your microphone and the meeting's system audio as separate streams, so it knows who said what, and works with Zoom, Teams and Google Meet without joining the meeting. A web app is available too, and an in-person conversation can be coached from a laptop open on the table. The difference is reach: Hedy additionally runs on iPhone, iPad, Android and Apple Watch. On mobile it uses the device microphone, which makes it genuinely convenient for in-person meetings, though Hedy notes it cannot capture a phone call taking place on the same handset. ConversationPilot has no mobile app.

Languages

Hedy markets "30+ languages" and its help centre lists 36 for transcription, from Afrikaans to Vietnamese, with Arabic, Hindi and Thai unavailable on mobile. One caveat worth knowing: Hedy's default on-device Whisper engine does not auto-detect language and assumes a single language for the whole session. Auto-detection requires either its Nemotron Multilingual local engine or a cloud speech provider (Deepgram or OpenAI), and Hedy itself describes mixed-language meetings as the hardest case for any engine.

ConversationPilot transcribes through OpenAI's Whisper API, which detects the language automatically by default; you can also pin a single language in the desktop app if you know the call will stay in one. In practice the two are closer than their marketing suggests: both can detect language automatically, but Hedy's default engine does not and ConversationPilot's does, at the cost of sending audio clips to a cloud service, which is the trade-off Hedy's cloud speech option also makes. If you routinely switch between, say, German and English on a call, check the default behaviour of whichever tool you pick.

Pricing (checked 14 September 2026)

Hedy is one of the cheapest tools in this category. Its pricing page lists, in US dollars: Free at $0 with up to 5 hours per month, summaries and notes, 30+ languages and real-time insights for the first 30 minutes of each session; Pro at $12.99 a month or $99.99 a year (roughly $8.33 a month, shown as a 36% yearly saving) with unlimited meeting length and sessions, imports of past recordings, Topics and Zapier and API integrations; and a Lifetime licence at $299 one-time. Hedy's Terms define "lifetime" as the lifetime of the product, and the licence is non-transferable. Resellers periodically discount further (AppSumo has listed a $179 lifetime deal; StackSocial a $49.99 first year). Teams pricing has not been published. Website purchases are refundable within 14 days; App Store and Google Play refunds are handled by Apple and Google.

ConversationPilot is priced as a professional tool rather than a consumer app. The Free plan needs no card and gives you 3 calls a month with a transcript and post-call report, but no live coaching. Solo is $39 a month or $384 a year, Team is $59 per seat per month or $588 a year, and Manager is $89 per seat per month or $900 a year, with GBP and EUR pricing also available. Paid plans start with a 7-day free trial that requires a card, with a no-usage rule: if your account has never run a coached call when the trial ends, the trial is extended once and then cancelled rather than charged. There is also a 14-day guarantee on the first charge if no coached calls have been run since it.

On a straight price comparison Hedy wins clearly. The question is whether you are buying occasional nudges and notes for one person, or continuous coaching, scores and a team layer for people whose calls carry a quota.

• Hedy: Free (5 hrs/month), Pro $12.99/month or $99.99/year, Lifetime $299, Teams unpublished
• ConversationPilot: Free (3 calls/month with report, no live coaching), Solo $39/month or $384/year, Team $59/seat/month or $588/year, Manager $89/seat/month or $900/year
• Neither free tier needs a card; ConversationPilot's paid plans start with a 7-day card-required trial that is never charged if unused
• Hedy prices in USD only; ConversationPilot also bills in GBP and EUR

Data handling, privacy and consent

Hedy's privacy architecture is a real strength and deserves a fair description. By default, audio capture and speech-to-text happen on your device and no audio is sent to Hedy or any third party; audio recordings are off by default and, if enabled, stay on the device unless you share them. Transcripts are stored locally unless you turn on Cloud Sync, share a session or use the web app. The analysis step that writes summaries and suggestions does run in the cloud by default, on providers such as Google Vertex AI, Together.AI, DeepInfra and Nebius, where Hedy says transcript content is processed in memory only and not used for training. Since Hedy 3.2 (May 2026) you can switch on Local AI Processing and keep the whole pipeline on-device on Apple Silicon Macs, capable Windows GPUs, recent iPhones and iPads and supported Android phones, at the cost of speed (Hedy says a summary can take thirty seconds to several minutes locally) and memory (16 GB RAM for mid-tier models, 36 GB or more for the largest). New users choose EU or US data residency at onboarding. Hedy holds a SOC 2 Type I report (point-in-time, April 2026, under NDA) and completed a HIPAA Business Associate assessment.

ConversationPilot sends short audio clips to OpenAI's Whisper API for live transcription and does not store the audio itself; OpenAI does not train on API data and deletes it under its API retention policy, currently up to 30 days for abuse monitoring or immediately where zero data retention applies. The transcript text is then sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate the coaching cards and reports. Transcripts and reports are stored in your account, you can delete any call from its report page, and deleting your account deletes everything. Your conversations are never used to train models, by ConversationPilot or its providers. The company behind it is Future Systems AI Ltd, registered in England and Wales. Hedy's default of on-device speech recognition is stricter for audio than ConversationPilot's live cloud transcription, so if keeping audio off every server is your first requirement, Hedy has the edge, especially with Local AI switched on.

On consent, the two vendors say the same thing. Hedy's Terms forbid recording, transcribing or processing conversations without appropriate consent from all participants as required by law, its recruiter page tells hiring managers to always tell candidates before the interview begins, and its own blog puts it well: removing the bot removes a notification, not an obligation. ConversationPilot's Terms say the same in different words. Neither tool will notify the other party for you. Rules differ by country and, in the United States, by state; several jurisdictions, including California and many EU countries, require every participant's consent, and data-protection law in the UK and EU expects transparency even where it does not.

Interview use: candidate side vs interviewer side

This is a genuine point of difference in positioning. Hedy ships a candidate-side Job Interview session type, and its own post on the subject says it runs on your device with no visible indicator to other participants. To Hedy's credit, the company has repeatedly and publicly refused to build auto-answer features, draws the line at AI use that deceives the interviewer, and advises candidates to ask before recording. Its Recruitment mode is for the hiring side.

ConversationPilot's recruitment mode is built for the interviewer: structured screening questions, candidate signals such as notice period or counteroffer risk, and a live scorecard, all under the employer's own rules. For candidates, the appropriate use is preparation and practice ahead of the interview, not live prompting during one. If a candidate-side live mode is what you are looking for, Hedy offers one and ConversationPilot does not; we would encourage anyone using either tool in an interview to follow the interviewer's rules on AI use.

When to choose Hedy instead

There are several situations in which Hedy is the better choice, and it would be misleading to pretend otherwise.

Choose Hedy if you need a phone or watch in the room. ConversationPilot has no mobile app, so if you want to coach a lecture, a medical appointment or a meeting across a table without a laptop open, Hedy is the tool. Choose Hedy if budget is the constraint: $99.99 a year or a one-off $299 is a fraction of a professional coaching subscription, and the free tier is permanent. Choose Hedy if you want audio to stay on your device by default, or the option of a fully local AI pipeline and EU residency. Choose Hedy if your meetings are varied (a lecture on Monday, a negotiation on Tuesday, a coaching session on Wednesday) and you value breadth of session types over depth in one. And choose Hedy if you want cross-session memory and Pro integrations through Zapier, n8n, a REST API, webhooks or an MCP server.

Be aware of the trade-offs Hedy's own material makes clear: suggestions are periodic and capped per session, there is no team or manager plan yet, no CRM integration, and Local AI is slow on anything but a well-specified machine. Tracxn lists the company at three employees with no funding raised, which is a consideration for a lifetime licence, though Hedy's 2026 shipping cadence has been brisk.

Side-by-side comparison

The table below is meant to be read fairly. Hedy's price, platform reach and on-device audio handling are real advantages, and ConversationPilot does not claim otherwise. Hedy figures come from its pricing page, help centre and privacy documentation as of 14 September 2026; ConversationPilot figures come from its own pricing, trust and terms pages on the same date.

Trying both, or switching

The two tools do not conflict, and the cheapest way to decide is to run them side by side. Hedy's free tier needs no card and gives you 5 hours a month with 30 minutes of live suggestions per session, which is enough to judge whether periodic nudges and post-session notes are what you want. ConversationPilot's Free plan also needs no card and gives 3 calls a month with a transcript and report but no live coaching, so you can look before you start a trial; the 7-day trial requires a card but is never charged if you do not run a coached call.

If you are moving from Hedy to ConversationPilot, export your Hedy notes first (Hedy exports to plain text, Markdown, Word or PDF), then install the ConversationPilot desktop app on your Mac or Windows machine, pick the mode that matches your call and join your next Zoom, Teams or Meet call as normal. No calendar access or meeting invite is required, and because nothing joins the call, the other side's experience does not change. If you are moving the other way, Hedy's mobile apps mean you can keep coaching in-person meetings from a phone rather than a laptop.