Spellar AI Reviews

I was never really able to get this to work. I had a real problem recording audio and was never able to get it to summarize anything, even if I could get a transcript at all. It did a poor job of detecting and identifying speakers other than myself.

You open Spellar on iPhone, activate recording
and start a phone call.

When you come back to Spellar after the call there's a message like
'Recording was stopped because another app needed the microphone'.

What a nonsense. I thought that's what Spellar was built for ?!?!
Four!! unanswered, perfectly calm + friendly emails later: no response.

Refund.

Could be a good product but the output - even with an extensive prompt - does not conform to the prompt. I can take the transcript + prompt and put them into Claude or Chatgpt and get what I want. But using Claude or Chatgpt in spellar with the same prompt and you get a useless summary (someone else below is also complaining about the summary). Will be a refund if this isn't fixed.

👍 The idea with Spellar is brilliant. I love that you can keep track of all the meetings you're having, take notes, browse through them, get summaries of what happened in your week... That the recordings are saved on device (in fact only the audio is saved for a few days so you get only the transcriptions, which saves on space).

And having it lifetime, with a tiny cost in the Claude/GPT access (just a fraction of what other tools like Otter, Fireflies, tl;dv of Fathom cost). And it's multilingual, quite important for me (I work in Spanish for the most part but attend meetings in English and Swedish).
Spellar is quick to set up, prompts you to start recording in meetings (without intruding as an attendee) and you can save your meetings in folders.

So far so good.

👎 But the output. 😨😱😖🤬

Firstly, there's 21 (!) types of meetings, and no explained list of what makes each different. They all seem strange to me (none is called "webinar" or "training" for instance, which are my most usual types). Perhaps Spellar thinks having so many is a plus, but for me it's just confusing.

Thing is, NONE of them work as you would expect.
I've been using this kind of tools (all that I mentioned above) for several years and they give you a summary, and then with time stamps they tell you what was covered in the meeting, section by section, from start to finish. At the end, you may have action items or something of the sort.

But Spellar is different. The outputs are well edited, with colored blocks and sections... that don't match the order of things covered. And don't include all points discussed, either.

Time stamps is a crucial feature for me, because what I do with these student trainings is copy the summary and paste it in my course platform, so they can watch only the section they're interested in. I got help a few times from the Spellar team to make a personalized prompt template that would trigger them. Only to find that hitting "Reanalyze" would sometimes produce time stamps, and sometimes not. At random.

A few examples that I've experienced:
1) For a 1-hour call, the summary would start with what was discussed on minute 27 (what about the first half hour??).

2) I attended a training webinar (one of those that has half an hour of training and half an hour of sales pitch afterwards) and the summary detailed the sales offer but included nothing of the training itself (even though it was included in the transcript and if I asked specifically to the AI chat, I would get info about it).

It seems Spellar is not providing actual summaries, but rather judging what is important and not in the meeting - with very strange criteria. Even if I have attended the meeting, I can hardly recognize it in the summary - it feels very foreign, hard to relate, not a summary of something I attended and would therefore be familiar.

You would expect the personalized Templates to modify the output with my own prompts, but they cannot override the system Meeting Types.

If Spellar is able to fix this, and create a Meeting Type that is "Regular Chronological Summary" like pretty much all other tools do, that would create an output that matches the event it recorded, I would be super happy - and then I would give it at least 4 Tacos.

As it is at present, it just won't work for me and I'll have to return it. With sadness, because I would love to have this tool, but if the output doesn't work, there's no point in having it.

I submit this in the hope that my points will be taken into consideration. Customer service is helpful but extremely slow (no response via email, there's a rather inactive Slack group, and either via Slack or here in Appsumo it takes at least 4 days to get a reply) - that would be the missing 5th Taco for me.

I can see the potential, but... so far I've only used Spellar to attempt to record iPhone calls, and it has been a complete bust at that. I sent two emails to the support team, with screenshots, and haven't heard back yet.

This was the main use case I got this app for, so my final rating and review will depend on what happens, but for now, I'm not impressed. One taco, with the right to revise my rating if the iPhone recording feature can actually be made to work!