Otter.ai
$17 /mo
Every month, forever
Point your camera at anything — plants, labels, homework, signs. Get answers and follow-ups, all on your phone.
Snap a photo of a plant, a foreign label, a math problem, or anything you can't quite name. Cove answers in your language, on your device.
Cove keeps the photo in context across a chat. Ask 'is this safe for my dog?' or 'what's the gluten content?' without retaking the picture.
Every photo and answer lives in a history you can scroll, search, and pin. Stored only on your phone, never on a server.
Photos are processed on-device. Cove does not upload them, does not OCR them in the cloud, and does not collect telemetry on what you photographed.
Snap the leaf. Cove names the species, summarizes care needs, and answers your follow-up — 'is this toxic to cats?' — without sending the picture anywhere.
Photograph the back of a Japanese snack pack at 2am in a Tokyo combini. Cove reads the ingredient list, flags allergens, and translates the storage instructions — offline.
Point the camera at a tricky math problem. Cove walks through the steps and lets you ask 'why does that work?' without your kid's worksheet ending up on someone else's training data.
| Feature | Cove | Google Lens | ChatGPT Vision |
|---|---|---|---|
| Works fully offline | ✓ | – | – |
| Photos never uploaded | ✓ | – | – |
| Multi-turn follow-up about the photo | ✓ | ~ | ✓ |
| Searchable local history | ✓ | ~ | ~ |
| One-time purchase | ✓ | ✓ | – |
Cove ships a Gemma 4 multimodal model that runs on your phone's NPU. The first launch downloads the model once; after that every photo, every follow-up, every answer is computed locally — no upload, no API key, no cloud.
Google Lens uploads each photo to Google's servers and ties results to your Google account. Cove processes the photo on your phone and never associates the result with any identity. The trade-off is range — Lens has more obscure objects in its index; Cove gets the common 90% with no upload.
On everyday objects, plants, common labels, and printed text Cove is close. For obscure or fine-grained recognition (rare bird subspecies, niche industrial parts) a larger cloud model still wins. We list this honestly so you can pick the right tool.
On your phone, in app-private storage. Uninstalling Cove deletes everything. There is no Cove account, no cloud sync, and no way for us to retrieve a photo even if you asked us to.
Pricing
A single purchase unlocks all four Pro apps — no subscriptions, no renewals.
Otter.ai
$17 /mo
Every month, forever
Cove
$12.96 once
One purchase, yours for life
Otter.ai charges $17 every month. Cove charges once.
Indie-built. No venture money. No dark patterns.
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One download. No account. Photos stay on your phone.