When we asked ChatGPT and Gemini what transcription software buyers should use, five tools tied for first: Alice, Notta, Rev, Riverside and Sonix were each named in 3 of the 6 buyer questions we ran on 2026-08-06, and no product was named in more than half the answers.
We put six real buyer questions to ChatGPT and Gemini, gave each one live web search, and recorded every product they named and every source domain behind those answers. Across the 6 questions, 23 distinct product labels came up and 24 source domains fed the answers. Four of the six questions returned 8 products each, one returned 7, and one returned none at all.
Below the top five, six products were named in 2 of the 6 answers: Castmagic, Descript, Fireflies, GoTranscript, Otter and Otter.ai. Two of those are the same brand: the assistants wrote "Otter" in 2 answers and "Otter.ai" in 2 others, so Otter's presence is split across two labels rather than combined. Fireflies has the same split, named as "Fireflies" in 2 answers and as "Fireflies.ai" in 1 more. We report them as measured rather than adding them up.
How the shortlist changed across the six questions
The shortlist barely held still. Of the 23 product labels named across the 6 questions, only Riverside appeared in both a general "best" question and the "best free" question. Almost every other tool showed up for one phrasing and vanished for the next.
The bare "best transcription software" question returned 8 tools: Otter.ai, Sonix, Notta, Fireflies, Rev, Descript, Riverside and Alice. This is the closest thing to a consensus list, and it leans toward polished paid products. "What transcription software should I use" returned a near-identical 8: Rev, GoTranscript, Alice, Castmagic, Otter, Sonix, Notta and Fireflies.
"Best transcription software for small teams" pulled in four tools that appeared in no other question: Gong, Krisp, MeetGeek and Fireflies.ai. All four are meeting-and-call tools rather than general transcribers, so the words "small teams" quietly reweighted the whole answer toward collaboration software. That question returned 8 products in total.
"Best free transcription software" produced an almost entirely separate shortlist of 7 tools, and six of them appeared nowhere else: Gladia, HappyScribe, MacWhisper, turboscribe.ai, uniscribe.co and WhisperTranscribe. Only Riverside carried over from the paid lists. If you sell a free tier and you are not on the free list, your ranking on the paid "best" list will not save you.
"Most affordable transcription software" returned 0 products. Its seven sources were dominated by dictionary and definition pages, Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Cambridge Dictionary and Wiktionary, plus most.io and missourimost.org, so the search matched the word "most" and never reached a product roundup. A buyer asking for the cheapest option got no recommendation at all.
"Transcription software recommendations" returned 8 products and surfaced the last two one-question-only names, Voicenotes and Wispr Flow, alongside repeat picks Rev, Alice, Castmagic, Otter, Descript and Riverside. In total, 12 of the 23 named labels appeared in only a single one of the six questions.
The source map: who feeds these answers
Two domains fed more answers than any product earned. Reddit.com and Zapier.com each sat behind 5 of the 6 answers, 83% apiece. Community threads and a single big how-to publisher, not a review directory, are doing most of the work here.
Community and Q&A sites showed up constantly: reddit.com in 5 of 6 answers, quora.com and the expert Q&A site justanswer.com in 2 each, community.spiceworks.com and a Harvard Kennedy School ask-a-librarian page in 1 each. Reddit alone fed more answers than any single editorial roundup.
Editorial roundups filled most of the rest: zapier.com in 5 of 6 answers, wondertools.substack.com in 4 of 6, nytimes.com in 3 of 6, with one-off mentions from morningscore.io, lindy.ai, mediacopilot.ai, guideflow.com and reduct.video.
Here is the insight a vendor should not miss. HappyScribe's own website, happyscribe.com, fed 4 of the 6 answers, tied for the third most-cited source of all, and HappyScribe was named as a product in the free question. Riverside's own site riverside.com fed 1 answer and Riverside was named in 3. WhisperTranscribe's own site did the same, feeding 1 answer for 1 naming. When a vendor's own pages are good enough to be quoted, the assistant recommends the vendor using the vendor's own words.
No review directory appeared at all. G2, Capterra, TrustRadius and Software Advice fed 0 of the 6 answers. The star ratings and category leaderboards that dominate classic software SEO were nowhere in these AI recommendations.
What a vendor here would do to get named
For a marketing team in transcription, the takeaway is narrow and useful: get present where these answers are actually sourced. That means Reddit and Quora threads, a Zapier or Wondertools roundup, and your own site being clear enough to quote, not a directory profile that fed 0 answers here.
Market share did not decide this list. Five different tools tied at 3 of 6, and household names sat one label apart from tiny tools like uniscribe.co and turboscribe.ai, each named once. The source list, not your install base, decided who the assistants named.
Phrasing decided as much as presence. The same category returned 8 products for "recommendations" and 0 for "most affordable". If you only track the single word "best", you miss the small-teams, free and affordability questions where entirely different tools win or nobody wins.
The full list, counted
| Product | Named in | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Alice | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Notta | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Rev | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Riverside | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Sonix | 3 of 6 | 50% |
| Castmagic | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Descript | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Fireflies | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| GoTranscript | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Otter | 2 of 6 | 33% |
| Otter.ai | 2 of 6 | 33% |
Otter and Otter.ai are the same brand under two labels, as are Fireflies and Fireflies.ai (1 of 6, sitting just below this table). We list them as they were measured rather than combining them into a number the data does not show.
Glotier does not sell transcription software, so we are correctly absent from every one of these answers. We did not appear, and we should not have. But this measurement is exactly the thing we run for a customer's own category: the six questions, the products named, and the source domain behind each answer. If you want to see your category's version of this page, the check is free, takes about a minute, and needs no account.