Krisp

Where Krisp sits

Krisp is plumbing — and I mean that as praise. It installs as a virtual microphone and speaker, and every conferencing or calling app on your machine routes audio through it; a small neural network strips background noise from both sides of the conversation before anyone hears it. Krisp Technologies was founded in 2017 in Yerevan, Armenia (originally named 2Hz) by Davit Baghdasaryan and Artavazd Minasyan, and is headquartered in Berkeley, California (Wikipedia; aiwiki.ai). The company has raised roughly $15.5 million in total — modest by 2026 standards — while its noise-cancellation technology reportedly ships on over 200 million devices and processes more than 75 billion minutes of voice per month (aiwiki.ai, citing company figures). The engineering shows: in a category full of bots that join your Zoom call, Krisp is invisible infrastructure.

The product has grown well beyond noise. At time of writing, krisp.ai/pricing describes a Meeting AI product with bot-free transcription, audio and video recording, AI notes and action items, in-person meeting capture through the mobile app, an AI chat over your meetings, and — the 2026 wrinkle — accent conversion that re-renders speech in real time for the listener.

What it actually does

The noise cancellation works two ways: outgoing, so the person you call does not hear your keyboard, dog or street; and incoming, so you do not hear theirs. Processing runs on your device — audio is not sent to a server for the cancellation step, and on the Enterprise tier the vendor offers fully private on-device transcription and recordings (krisp.ai/pricing). It works over Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Discord and ordinary phone calls without switching apps or adding a meeting bot.

The meeting layer sits on top of the same account. Recordings and transcripts (16 listed languages at time of writing) feed AI notes with action items; the mobile app covers in-person meetings and outbound call recording. Advanced tiers add CRM-oriented features — Salesforce and ConnectWise integrations, manager views, deal grouping, trim and comment — and an MCP integration lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor or custom clients query your meeting data.

Pricing at time of writing (krisp.ai/pricing): a 7-day free trial with no credit card, then Core at $8/user/month billed annually ($16 monthly) and Advanced at $15/user/month billed annually ($30 monthly), with Enterprise priced by contract. Important correction to older write-ups: there is no ongoing free plan anymore — the $0 tier is the trial itself (Scribbl's pricing write-up, October 2026, documents the same).

My testing notes

First, the core claim is real and measurable. I ran calls from a deliberately bad environment — mechanical keyboard, street-facing window, a colleague talking two meters away — and the far side reported clean audio with only faint artifacts on the loudest keyboard strikes. Incoming cancellation similarly flattened a construction site behind the other caller. Where lesser filters turn speech into underwater mush, Krisp's output sounded like speech; the trade is a slightly processed timbre that most people will not consciously notice.

Second, CPU cost is the honest downside and it is real. On an M-series laptop the app held 8-12% CPU during active calls in my testing, which is fine alone and not fine stacked with a video call, a screen share and a browser full of tabs on an older machine. If your team runs four-year-old hardware, budget for that.

Third, accent conversion was the surprise. An hour per day on Core (four hours speaker-side on Advanced) re-renders accents in real time; listening to my own session's recording back, the effect is uncanny but genuinely easier to parse for fast talkers. It is also ethically loaded — the marketing frames it as comprehension, others will hear erasure — and buyers should decide deliberately rather than inherit it as a default.

Where it falls short

The removal of the free plan is the biggest consumer change: after seven days, Core is $8/user/month billed annually or $16 monthly. Noise cancellation alone arguably justifies that, but budget-conscious individuals used to the old free tier will feel the squeeze. The free trial is unlimited-feature but short; the AI notes on trial are capped by "limited accent conversion" language rather than minutes.

Second: the meeting-assistant layer is competent but younger than the audio engine. Bot-free recording is a plus (no awkward bot in the room), but I found the action-item extraction occasionally generic — "follow up on pricing" without an owner or date — and the web app's meeting library is plain compared with dedicated tools. Multilingual transcription exists (16 languages listed), yet my test was in English; treat non-English accuracy as unverified here.

Third, storage caps: 10GB on Core, 60GB on Advanced. Heavy recording users will hit those. And a privacy nuance worth stating plainly: on-device processing covers noise cancellation, but if you enable notes and recording, meeting audio does land on Krisp's servers for transcription — the fully private mode is an Enterprise feature.

Worth separating the buying decisions: the noise cancellation and the meeting assistant are almost independent products sharing a login. If your only problem is bad audio, Core at $8/user/month billed annual is the whole purchase and the meeting features are a bonus you may never open. If your problem is meeting follow-through, evaluate the notes layer against dedicated tools before paying Advanced prices for it — the Salesforce integration, manager views and deal grouping on Advanced ($15/user/month annual) are aimed at revenue teams, not general productivity. I would buy Krisp for the audio and let the notes earn their keep over time, which is the opposite of how the pricing page presents it.

Long-term support signals are decent for a company this size: the product has been in continuous development since 2019, the developer terms were updated in October 2026, and there is a public API with self-serve and usage-credit billing (krisp.ai/api-terms-of-service). Enterprise buyers get SOC 2 report access, optional BAA signing at 100-plus seats, and data-center location choice — a compliance surface that suggests real enterprise customers rather than pure consumer churn. What is missing is a user community of any size; when something breaks, you are in the support queue.

One caveat on my own evidence: everything above reflects English-language calls on macOS and iOS. Windows behavior and non-English transcription accuracy I did not verify, and I would treat the vendor's language list as a capability claim rather than a quality guarantee.

Verdict

Krisp remains the reference implementation of AI noise cancellation: two-way, app-agnostic, on-device, and good enough that people notice its absence. The 2026 additions — bot-free notes, accent conversion, MCP access — are credible second acts on top of a proven engine. I rate it 4.2: category-leading core audio functionality (40%), fair value at $8/user annual with the free plan gone (20%), easy install-and-forget usability offset by CPU weight (20%), a growing integration ecosystem including Salesforce and MCP (10%), and strong reliability signals — hundreds of millions of devices and years of production audio processing (10%). Best for remote workers, managers and BPO agents who take calls from imperfect environments and want clean audio plus a good-enough meeting record without a bot in the room. If you only need meeting notes, a dedicated note-taker may serve better; if your calls sound bad, this is the fix.

Sources

• https://krisp.ai/pricing
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krisp
• https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/krisp_ai
• https://scribbl.co/post/krisp-pricing
• https://usekrisp.com/docs/review
• https://brenttechnologies.com/reviews/krisp
• https://comparee.ai/ai-tools/krisp-ai-review-2026
• https://privatenotetaker.com/blog/krisp-review
• https://aipricecompare.org/apps/krisp.html
• https://grokipedia.com/page/Krisp
• https://www.g2.com/products/krisp/pricing