Avoma comes up a lot in sales and customer success teams because it was built around revenue conversations, not just generic meeting notes. Indian teams that try it usually like it at first, then run into two familiar walls: a client call that moves between Hindi and English in the same breath, and a review held around a conference table instead of on a screen. If you are looking for an Avoma alternative for Indian teams, this guide is a fair, fact checked comparison: what Avoma genuinely does well, where it runs into limits that matter more in India, and a checklist to run on any alternative you shortlist, Zrec included.
What Avoma actually does well
Most comparison articles jump straight to complaints. Based on Avoma's own product and help pages, several things are genuinely solid:
- Wide transcription language coverage. Avoma's help centre lists support for more than 60 languages and dialects, and Hindi is one of them. That puts it ahead of tools that only handle English.
- Built for sales and customer calls. Avoma can score conversations against frameworks like MEDDIC, SPICED and NEAT, which is useful for a sales team that already runs its pipeline on one of those methods.
- Deep CRM and dialer integrations. It connects to Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM and Zendesk Sell, plus dialers like Aircall, Dialpad and RingCentral. For a sales team living inside a CRM all day, that is a real time saver.
- An "Ask Avoma" chatbot. Teams can ask questions across their call history instead of rewatching recordings to find what was said.
None of this is unique to Avoma, but it is real, and it explains why sales and customer success teams keep it around even after trying other notetakers.
Where Indian teams hit limits with Avoma
Two gaps show up repeatedly once an Indian team has used Avoma for a few weeks, and both come straight from Avoma's own help pages rather than guesswork.
Hindi, not Hinglish. Hindi being on Avoma's language list is a genuine plus over English-only tools. But Avoma's own help article on language support lists languages one at a time. It does not mention Hinglish, the Hindi and English code switching that most Indian sales calls, standups and client reviews actually happen in. A transcription engine tuned to recognise one language per conversation tends to stumble exactly where a speaker switches languages mid sentence, which in a typical Indian call can happen several times a minute, turning a clean transcript into a patchwork of broken fragments.
In-person meetings are a workaround, not a feature. Avoma's own help centre is direct about this: it says in-person meetings "don't provide separate audio channels for each participant," which makes identifying who said what much harder. Its suggested fixes are to start a virtual conference call during the in-person meeting and let Avoma record that, or to record manually on the Avoma mobile app and upload the file afterwards. Either way, one microphone, usually the one nearest the host, ends up picking up the whole room, and Avoma tends to label that one person as the speaker for the entire meeting. For a team where a good share of real decisions happen face to face in a conference room, that is a workaround bolted onto a tool built for screens, not a feature designed for the room.
Neither gap makes Avoma a weak product. It makes it a product tuned for sales teams that talk mostly in English on a screen, which is not how most Indian teams actually meet.
A checklist for any Avoma alternative, Zrec included
Use this list on every tool you shortlist, not just the one you end up choosing. Check each claim against the vendor's own pages, the same way this guide checked Avoma's.
Avoma alternative checklist
Recording
- Does it need a bot admitted into the call, or does it record from the computer directly, with nothing visible to the other participants?
- Can it record an in-person meeting using the laptop already in the room, with each speaker identified correctly, or does it need a workaround like a dummy video call or a separate recording app?
Language
- Does it list Hindi as a supported language, and is that support built for one language at a time, or for code switching within a sentence?
- Can it handle a speaker moving between Hindi and English mid sentence without breaking the transcript into fragments?
Output
- Does it write minutes of meeting (decisions, action items, owners, due dates), or only a transcript and a call summary you still have to turn into minutes yourself?
- Can every decision and action item be traced back to the exact moment it was said in the recording?
Privacy and consent
- Does it offer a recording consent notice you can paste into the meeting chat before the call starts?
- Can you set how long audio is kept, and delete a guest's recording on request?
For the background on the consent question specifically, see our guide on whether it is legal to record meetings in India.
Avoma vs an alternative built for Indian meetings
Here is the same checklist filled in with what each one can verifiably do today, based on public product and help pages.
| What to check | Avoma | What to look for in an alternative |
|---|---|---|
| Bot-free recording | Notetaker needs to be admitted into the call, such as in Google Meet; it is a visible participant | Records from the computer by default, with no bot to admit or manage |
| In-person meetings | Not natively supported; workaround is a dummy video call or the mobile app, with one microphone covering the whole room | Records a meeting around a table using the laptop already in the room, with speakers told apart |
| Hindi and Hinglish | Hindi listed among 60-plus languages; Hinglish code switching not mentioned on its help pages | Understands Hindi, English and Hinglish in the same conversation |
| Minutes, not just transcript | Generates AI call notes and follow-up emails; turning those into formal MOM is a manual step | Writes minutes automatically: decisions, action items, owners and due dates |
| Decision traceability | Notes and transcript are searchable through the "Ask Avoma" chatbot | Every decision links straight to the moment it was said |
| Consent and retention | No copyable consent notice mentioned on its help pages | A copyable consent notice and a retention window you set yourself |
Switching from Avoma without losing your call history
If Avoma has been your notetaker for a while, do not just cancel it and move on. A clean switch takes about half an hour and saves you from losing months of call history and CRM notes.
Switching checklist
- Export your Avoma call notes and transcripts before you cancel, especially anything already pushed into your CRM that you might need to re-check later.
- Tell your sales and customer success team the switch date, so nobody keeps two notetakers joining the same call out of habit.
- Set your retention window on the new tool on day one, rather than leaving it at a default you have not checked.
- Run your first week of client calls on both tools in parallel if the accounts matter, the way Rohan's team did before trusting a new tool with renewal conversations, then drop the old one once the minutes match up.
How to run this comparison on your own meetings
The fairest test is not a feature list, it is one real call. Take a recent Hinglish sales call, or a client review that moved to a conference room because the client was visiting your office, and run it through Avoma and through the alternative you are considering. Compare the two sets of notes side by side, and look specifically at names, numbers and any sentence that switches between Hindi and English mid thought. Priya, who runs customer renewals for a Bengaluru based SaaS team, says that single test told her more about speaker labelling and language handling in half an hour than a week of reading product pages.
Doing this with Zrec
Zrec was built around the two gaps this guide covers. It records meetings from the user's own computer, with no bot to admit and no extra device for in-person meetings, and the same approach works for Zoom, Google Meet, Teams and a conversation around a table. It understands English, Hindi and Hinglish, transcribing Hinglish in Roman script while keeping the minutes themselves in clean English. Every meeting gets minutes automatically: summary, decisions and action items with owners and due dates, each one linked to the exact moment it was said in the recording. A one-click consent notice and a retention window you control are part of the setup, not an afterthought. If Hinglish calls and in-person reviews are a regular part of your week, it is worth testing Zrec against Avoma on one real meeting using the checklist above.
For more on choosing between the wider set of AI notetakers available to Indian teams, see our guide to the best AI notetakers for Indian teams, and for the room-based side of this specifically, see how to record in-person meetings on a laptop. You can also start from the Zrec home page to see how the recording and minutes actually look.
Notta is the other wide-language tool teams compare against, so we ran the same checklist in our Notta alternative guide. Teams whose client calls slide between Hindi and English should also read our guide to recording Hinglish meetings and getting notes in English.
Before you commit to any Avoma alternative, run one real Hinglish or in-person meeting through it first. A feature list tells you what a tool claims, one meeting tells you what it actually does.