The product I bought from Appsumo in Jan 2023 was very intuitive to use and had excellent transcription tool features, even though it was a bit quirky (e.g. no copy/paste function). It was possible to hear relevant audio by placing the cursor at any point in the text and pressing play and so make thorough edits before exporting the edited transcript to Word and it was also possible to translate the edited transcript into a number of languages when downloading to Word.

All that has now gone.

Noota seems to have switched focus entirely to AI summaries to the detriment of the transcript editing interface, which has now become virtually unusable.
• it is no longer possible to change generic speaker names from Speaker1, Speaker 2 etc.
• basic text editing tools like search and replace have vanished;
• blocks of text can no longer be merged;
• the translation feature has vanished
• the AI summary occupies 2/3 of the screen and cannot be hidden, making text editing even more difficult;
• there are no tutorials, so no way to find out if workarounds exist for any of these issues
• customer support has been replaced by a useless AI assistant.
I'm extremely disappointed with this upgrade. It creates a lot of additional work. Please can we have the old version back?

I've been in contact with AppSumo customer support and they totally take Noota's side in this:

"Noota has confirmed that some of the features have been removed from the tool as a whole for all customers due to them transitioning the product away from being a subtitle tool. The Noota team stated that as the tool has evolved, the software is still equipped to handle a wide variety of features, but it is focusing more on tasks geared towards HR and recruitment over time.

This was not an easy decision for the Noota team to make, but these changes will ensure they are able to continue to offer access to the product (as well as provide new and improved features in the future). We want to assure you that these changes will be affecting all Noota customers moving forward and not just the Sumo-ling community.

While some previous features are no longer available, the Noota team has provided many new features to Sumo-lings that were not included in the original deal, such as automatic bot reporting, automatic AI reports, IA assistant copilot, and report customization options. Additionally, the Noota team is planning additional new features that will be available to Sumo-lings once they are released.

Please know, when you purchase a lifetime deal, you have access to that tool for the lifetime of the product. That being said, the nature of lifetime deals is that often they can provide many years of access to an awesome tool and sometimes teams do need to pivot their products.

In this case, we know that these changes to Noota are a disappointment and may disrupt your ability to use the product. We certainly empathize with that and know what an inconvenience this may cause. As a reminder as well, these changes are affecting all customers that use the Noota platform and this is not something only affecting lifetime accounts.

Your Noota purchase was made back in 2022, so this product is now well outside of our 60-day refund window. Because of this, we are unable to offer a refund for your purchase either back to your original form of payment or as AppSumo credits and cannot make any exceptions.

We truly understand that situations like this can be frustrating and an inconvenience to your business, which is why we launched our Purchase Protection Policy in 2023 to provide customers with an additional layer of protection never before granted. Our Purchase Protection Policy applies to all future Select purchases from the AppSumo marketplace and clearly outlines the different ways we at AppSumo will be able to assist when closures or acquisitions like these occur.

While we can’t control actions taken by our Partners, we do our very best to ensure they honor their commitments to Sumo-lings. We apologize again for the inconvenience experienced with this tool and if we can help with anything else in the future please let us know."

The moral of the story is this: be very careful when you buy a "lifetime deal"from AppSumo. Appsumo is happy to take your money and look the other way when developers randomly discontinue the very features both they and AppSumo used to reel in the customer in the first place. What does it matter to them? They've taken their cut after all.