Why I built a call assistant that doesn't join the call

Every meeting assistant I tried wanted to join the call. It shows up in the participant list with a name like "Notetaker", and from that second the call is different. People hedge. Candidates get self-conscious. On a sales call the prospect starts performing for the recording.

That's fine if you're capturing an internal standup. It's the wrong shape for a live conversation where you need help in the moment and you'd rather not announce that you're getting it.

So I built Craqly the other way round. It runs as an overlay on your own machine, reads system audio locally, and puts suggested answers and context on your screen while you're talking. Nothing joins the call. Nobody sees an extra participant.

Because it reads system audio rather than hooking into one platform's API, it behaves the same on Zoom, Meet, Teams, and a plain phone call on speaker. That was the main reason I went this route instead of building four separate integrations and maintaining all of them.

The limitation, and it's a real one: desktop only, Mac and Windows. There's no mobile version and I doubt there will be, because the thing that makes it invisible is exactly the thing a phone OS won't let an app do.

The opinion I'll probably get argued with: I think the bot-in-the-call format won because it was easy to build, not because it was what anyone wanted. Every person I've watched use a notetaker has at some point wished it weren't sitting there in the list.

It's at https://craqly.com if you want to try it. There's a free tier. I'm a solo founder in Bengaluru and I also run Last Round AI, which is where the idea came from.