Real-time meeting assistant, bot-free
Primary sources checkedOLVA✓ Claimed by vendor
Meeting assistant that runs on your own laptop or phone instead of joining the call as a participant, transcribing, spotting questions and suggesting answers while you are still talking.
The short answer
- Best for
- Recruiters holding many conversations, often in a second language
- Not ideal for
- Structured assessment, where every candidate has to face the same questions
- Price
- Free for 2 hours a month, then from USD 12.50 per month
- Closest alternative
- MetaviewBuilt for interviews, so the notes serve a hiring decision rather than the conversation itself
At a glance
- Recruitment fitFair
- Ease of useUnknown
- ImplementationFair
- Price transparencyStrong
- Value for moneyUnknown
- ScalabilityUnknown
Why these assessments
- Recruitment fitFair
- Intake and client calls are recruitment work and it helps there, but nothing in the product is shaped around a hiring decision.
- Ease of useUnknown
- We have not used it. The product runs on your own device rather than as a bot in the call, and we have no independent account of how that behaves.
- ImplementationFair
- Nothing has to be added to the meeting, but getting notes into an ATS is work you build yourself.
- Price transparencyStrong
- Every self-serve tier (Basic, Plus, Pro) is published with an exact figure, both monthly and annual. Only Teams and Enterprise are quoted, which is how most software prices a custom, sales-assisted tier.
- Value for moneyUnknown
- Two hours a month free is about one interview day, and we have no independent evidence of what the paid tiers deliver in practice.
- ScalabilityUnknown
- Team and enterprise pricing, governance and admin controls are not published.
Our reading of the evidence on this page. No score, no formula.
Where it sits
- Discover
- Screen
- Interview
- Decision
The SourcrLab bottom line
The interesting part is the position, not the feature list: OLVA differentiates itself by putting much more of the assistance inside the conversation itself, rather than after it, without a bot in the participant list. For a recruiter working in Dutch, French and English on the same day, live translation across 87 languages is a real argument, and the price is published and low. Two things should decide it. OLVA is not built specifically for recruitment, so there are currently no native ATS integrations or recruitment-specific interview structures. And because there is no visible bot in the meeting, teams need to handle disclosure explicitly rather than relying on the presence of a meeting bot as a signal.
Best fit
Intake calls, client conversations and multilingual interviews where the help you need is during the call: what was agreed three weeks ago, what the term you just heard means, what the question actually was. In-person conversations work too, which no bot-based notetaker can do.
Think twice if
Structured candidate assessment. Live suggestions and coaching in an interview cut against comparing candidates on the same questions, and without a visible bot the disclosure to the candidate is something the team has to arrange itself.
SourcrLab assessment
Everything on this page comes from the vendor's own pages, checked on the dates below. SourcrLab has not used this product in real recruitment work, so you will not find a first-hand opinion here.
Why choose OLVA?
Help arrives during the call, not after it
Question detection, contextual answers and live coaching are the point of the product. A summary you read afterwards cannot save a call where you did not know the answer; this is aimed at that moment instead.
No extra participant in the call
It captures audio from your own device rather than joining as a bot, so a candidate does not see a notetaker in the participant list. In a first conversation with a passive candidate, that visible bot changes the tone of the call more than most people admit.
It works in the room, not only in the browser
Mobile apps cover in-person conversations, which a meeting-bot workflow on its own cannot cover: intakes at a client's office, conversations at a job fair, a coffee with a candidate.
Built for people not working in their first language
The vendor lists 87 languages and regional variants with live translation. In Belgian and Dutch recruitment, where one day runs in Dutch, French and English, that is a more concrete benefit than most AI features on this site.
Published prices, and a cheap ceiling
Free for 2 hours a month, USD 12.50 a month for 15 hours, USD 19.99 a month for unlimited meeting time. Unlimited at twenty dollars removes the usual meter-watching, and it undercuts the recruitment-specific notetakers in our catalogue.
Main trade-offs
What this assessment rests on
This assessment is based on OLVA's public documentation and information supplied directly by the vendor. SourcrLab has not used OLVA in real recruitment work. The feature list and the differentiators are the vendor's, and transcription quality on a Flemish or French accent is untested here, which is exactly where these products usually disappoint.
Disclosure has to be handled explicitly
The bot-free design is a genuine advantage that comes with a duty attached. A bot in the participant list doubles as an unmissable notice; running on your own device does not. Under GDPR a candidate still has to be informed that the conversation is captured and processed — informing is a transparency duty, separate from consent as the legal basis for processing — so teams need to handle that explicitly rather than relying on the presence of a meeting bot as a signal.
Live coaching sits badly with structured interviewing
Comparable hiring decisions rest on asking candidates the same things and judging the answers the same way. A tool that suggests follow-ups mid-interview pushes the other way, and if you use it to help evaluate candidates you are on the terrain that EU rules on AI in recruitment are written for. That is an assessment to make before rollout, not after.
Two hours a month is one interview day
The free plan covers 2 hours of meeting time a month and Plus 15 hours. Fifteen hours is roughly twenty interviews of 45 minutes, so a recruiter in a normal week is on the unlimited Pro plan, not on the cheaper one.
Getting notes into the ATS is your build
The integrations named are Google Docs, Slides and Drive, Slack, Notion, calendars and outbound webhooks. No native ATS or recruitment CRM integration is currently listed, so notes reach the candidate record because you put them there or because someone wires the webhook. That is workable, and it is exactly the work a recruitment-specific notetaker removes.
Recruiters are one audience among several
Recruiting is one of several use cases rather than the product's sole focus, alongside sales, account management, product, consulting and executive work. The consequence for a recruiter is concrete rather than theoretical: no interview scorecards, no competency structure, no native ATS or recruitment CRM integration listed, and a general meeting workflow instead of a hiring one.
The data leaves the EU, and that is documented
OLVA says data may be processed and stored in the US and other countries and publishes its main subprocessors, naming Deepgram for speech-to-text and OpenAI for AI features, with standard contractual clauses where required. The privacy policy also states that meeting audio and video are not stored and that customer content is not used to train general-purpose models. EU teams should still check the applicable DPA, transfer safeguards and their own data requirements before rollout, particularly for candidate conversations.
Pricing and buying reality
Free for 2 hours a month, then from USD 12.50 per month
- Basic: USD 0, 2 hours of meeting time a month
- Plus: USD 12.50 a month, published as USD 150 a year, 15 hours of meeting time a month
- Pro: USD 19.99 a month, published as USD 239.88 a year, unlimited meeting time
- Teams and Enterprise: quoted, sales-assisted
- All paid plans include live transcription, real-time insights, in-meeting chat, question detection, the AI coach, summaries and post-meeting Q&A
- Desktop apps for Windows and macOS, mobile apps for iOS and Android
What we do not know
- Whether a month-to-month rate exists. The monthly figures multiply exactly into the yearly ones
- What Teams and Enterprise cost, and from how many seats
- Whether unlimited meeting time also means unlimited use of every AI feature, live translation included
- Whether a data processing agreement is available, and on which plans
- How well transcription holds up on Flemish, Dutch and French accents
- Whether the free plan expires or simply stops at the hour limit
Checked on the vendor's pricing page, August 2026. OLVA website and published plans
How it fits your stack
Works with
- Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack huddles and Webex, without joining them
- Google Docs, Slides and Drive, Slack, Notion and calendars
- Outbound webhooks, which is how anything reaches your ATS
Likely replaces
- Typing notes while trying to listen
- The bot sitting in your candidate calls
May overlap with
- Metaview and BrightHire, which do the same capture inside a hiring process
- Fireflies, Otter, tl;dv and Grain, which record and summarise after the fact
Check before buying
- How you will tell candidates the conversation is captured, now that no bot does it
- Whether live coaching is acceptable in your interview process at all
- How many hours of conversation you really run per month
- Where the data is stored, and whether you can get a processing agreement
- How notes get into the candidate record, since there is no ATS integration
OLVA vs alternatives
Products a buyer would genuinely put next to this one, with the reason you would pick each instead.
Choose Metaview when the notes have to serve a hiring decision: it is built for interviews and speaks the language of a hiring process rather than a sales call.
Consider BrightHire when interview quality and consistency across interviewers is the problem you are solving, not your own performance in the call.
Consider Fireflies if you only want the recording, the transcript and the summary afterwards, and a bot in the call is not a problem.
Consider tl;dv when several people need to watch back the moments that mattered rather than read a summary.
Used OLVA?
Tell other recruiters what worked, what did not, and who it suits. Positive, mixed or critical — all useful.
Evidence
- Plan names, prices and hour limits — checked against a primary source: OLVA website and published plans
- Desktop apps for Windows and macOS, mobile for iOS and Android — checked against a primary source: OLVA website and published plans
- Runs from the user's device without joining the call — vendor claim, not independently verified: OLVA website and published plans
- 87 languages and regional variants, with live translation — vendor claim, not independently verified: OLVA website and published plans
- Question detection, live answers and coaching during the call — vendor claim, not independently verified: OLVA website and published plans
- Persistent memory across meetings — vendor claim, not independently verified: Product overview supplied by the vendor to SourcrLab, August 2026
- Integrations: Google Docs, Slides, Drive, Slack, Notion, calendars, webhooks — vendor claim, not independently verified: Product overview supplied by the vendor to SourcrLab, August 2026
- Meeting audio and video are not stored, and content is not used to train general models — vendor claim, not independently verified: OLVA privacy policy, including storage locations and subprocessors
- Data may be processed in the US and other countries, with named subprocessors — checked against a primary source: OLVA privacy policy, including storage locations and subprocessors
- Transcription quality on Dutch, Flemish and French accents — not enough evidence
- Whether every AI feature is unlimited on the unlimited plan — not enough evidence
- Availability of a data processing agreement — not enough evidence
- Teams and Enterprise pricing — not enough evidence
- Use in a real hiring process — not enough evidence
Last reviewed: August 2026. How SourcrLab verifies information
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