The best note-taking app for students in Ireland

Short answer first: start with the Microsoft licence your college already pays for, because Trinity, DCU and University of Galway all give students Microsoft 365 free but check whether your account includes Word's Transcribe before relying on its upload allowance. Then read your recording policy, because Trinity's June 2026 policy tells lecture participants not to record on personal devices and UCC wants the request in writing before you press record. Only then compare the paid apps, using the currency, tax and renewal price shown at your checkout.

Microsoft and Google publish Irish euro prices. The global Otter, Notability and Goodnotes web pages showed US dollars. This does not establish the currency of every Irish app-store purchase. Where a page showed dollars we give the dollar figure rather than a guess at the conversion.

The tools are assessed one by one in the best note-taking app for students. This page is the Irish part of the answer, and one section of it has no equivalent anywhere else on this site: what to do when the module is taught through Irish.

What does your college already give you?

Several Irish universities provide Microsoft 365 to their students. Trinity's IT services says all current Trinity students can use the Microsoft 365 Apps suite free of charge, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. DCU announced that Office 365 is available to all current staff and students free of charge. University of Galway tells students they can download and install the Microsoft 365 desktop applications on up to five devices at no additional cost. UCD's IT Services says Microsoft Office 365 is available to UCD students and staff, set up with the UCD email address and an active UCD Connect account. Read your own IT page before you read any pricing page.

If your college's licence is thinner than that, Microsoft's Irish education page still gives Office 365 A1 free to anyone with an eligible education email address, which is the web versions of Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. The page advertises a Premium promotion, but its linked Irish student offer currently describes a 50 percent Personal discount. That offer requires payment details and verified student status, renews monthly, and requires annual eligibility verification. Check the actual offer before subscribing. Premium is otherwise 22.00 euro a month or 219.00 euro a year, with Personal at 10.00 euro a month or 99.00 a year.

Check whether your account includes Word's Transcribe

Word offers a Transcribe feature on supported accounts. Upload a recording and Word gives back timestamped text. Microsoft's documentation sets the limits:

• 300 minutes of uploaded audio a month on a Microsoft 365 subscription, and 30,000 minutes with a Copilot licence.
• Word for the web in the new Microsoft Edge or Chrome, Word for Microsoft 365 on Windows, and OneNote on Windows. The Windows desktop version is limited to what Microsoft calls Commercial Tenants.
• 80 or more locales, with English in several regional variants.
• Education licences are not mentioned. The page names commercial and government tenants and says nothing about education tenants, so it does not tell you whether a university licence includes the transcription minutes. Test it on a ten-minute recording in week one rather than finding out in week ten.

Three hundred minutes is six fifty-minute lectures a month.

The VLE your lecturer publishes to

Another resource available through your college is its virtual learning environment, and if your lecturer publishes a recording there, that is the copy you are meant to use.

• Trinity. Blackboard, with Panopto for lecture capture recording from inside it.
• UCD, TU Dublin and UL. Brightspace, as UCD's IT Services, TU Dublin and UL each state, with UL's login at learn.ul.ie.
• UCC and University of Galway. Canvas. UCC's learning platforms policy names it as the virtual learning environment at the time of writing, and Galway's CELT says the university's Virtual Learning Environment is Canvas.
• Maynooth. Moodle, with Panopto lectures and recordings reached through it.
• DCU. Loop, which DCU describes as several learning technologies in one platform, with a heavily customised Moodle at its heart.

One warning before you build a workflow on that. Trinity's policy says lecture recordings are made available exclusively for internal use within Trinity, accessible to registered students only from inside the VLE, and that they may not be shared, distributed or accessed outside it. A plan that depends on pulling the video file out and feeding it to another tool is a plan that runs into a rule, not just a missing button. How the systems differ is covered in lecture capture at Irish universities.

What the Fund for Students with Disabilities pays for

If you have a disability, talk to your college's disability or access office before you spend anything. The Fund for Students with Disabilities covers assistive technology equipment and software, including student training, and the Higher Education Authority is clear that funding is allocated to the college, not the student. Register with the office as soon as you can, so the supports available through the fund can be arranged around you. AHEAD's AT Hive sorts assistive technology into 12 categories you can browse before that meeting, and says its aim is awareness of the types of AT rather than a substitute for the advice of the professionals in your own college. There is more on the funding side in the fund for students with disabilities.

Are you allowed to record at all?

Irish universities set their own rules; permission at one institution does not establish permission at another.

• Trinity. The Recording of Lectures Policy, version 1.0, issued 12 June 2026 and approved by Council on 27 May 2026, says lecture participants should not photograph or record sessions via personal devices, and that sessions must be viewed through authorised channels only. Unauthorised sharing or uploading to third party sites or messaging apps is a breach that brings disciplinary action.
• UCC. Where teaching is not already recorded by a university system, the policy lets you request advance permission from teaching staff. The request must be made in writing before you start recording, the recording is for studying, revising and exam preparation only, and covert recording is strictly prohibited.
• University of Galway. Policy QA202 says you may only record where the academic responsible has consented in writing before the lecture starts. Retrospective requests are not permissible, covert recording is a disciplinary offence, and where a School already makes recordings available routinely you may not make your own unless it is a reasonable adjustment.

Trinity's policy does carve out one route. Where a student cannot take accurate notes because of a disability, the disAbility Service may permit recording on a dictaphone or laptop software, the student signs a Code of Practice saying the recordings are for personal use and will not be shared, and the recordings remain the property of Trinity. The service page describes lectures, while the 2025/26 College Calendar includes lectures and tutorials. Confirm the scope of your approved arrangement with the service.

UCD's route is the same in shape. Permission to audio record lectures is one of the in-class supports agreed at a needs assessment with Access and Lifelong Learning. Students granted it agree that the recording is used exclusively for private study and is not disseminated or shared with any third party under any circumstances, and if a particular class cannot be recorded, UCD says the student should be told well in advance so an alternative such as detailed notes or a transcript can be arranged.

We went through the published wording institution by institution in what the recording rules actually say. For the shopping list it means one thing. An app that records quietly in the background, or sends a bot into an online class, is a poor fit for a system built on asking first. Written permission to record does not necessarily permit uploading that recording to an external AI service. Ask separately about processing and storage, including when recording is a disability accommodation.

What decides it for a student in Ireland?

• Price in euro. A dollar subscription moves with the exchange rate every month and some cards add a fee on top. Small, but it is the kind of small that compounds across four years.
• Language. Not just whether the tool lists your language, but how it handles it. Some tools take the English variant from your device region rather than from a setting you control.
• Notes or transcript. A transcript preserves the spoken wording, while notes organise the argument and revision questions let you test your understanding. The gap is the subject of transcription is not the same as notes.
• Where the audio goes. Ask where files are stored, then ask separately which country the speech-to-text runs in. The answers are often different, and most pricing pages answer neither.

Write those four down before you open a pricing page. The most important constraint may be language, permission, accessibility, budget or the output you need.

What if your module is taught through Irish?

Do not confuse English spoken with an Irish accent with Irish (Gaeilge). Otter's published language list does not include Irish. Check the exact language support of any other tool you consider.

There is an Irish-specific answer. Fotheidil, at fotheidil.abair.ie, is a web transcription tool for Irish from the ABAIR group. Its own page tells you to upload your audio or video files and get accurate Irish transcripts, driven by ABAIR's speech recognition technology. The research paper behind it, published in January 2025 in the proceedings of the 5th Celtic Language Technology Workshop, describes it as the first web-based transcription system for the Irish language, built as part of the ABAIR initiative and says the system combines pre-trained voice activity detection and speaker diarisation models with models trained specifically for Irish speech recognition and for restoring capitalisation and punctuation.

It is a transcription tool rather than a study tool, so the revision work on the output is still yours. For a lecture as Gaeilge, test it on a short permitted sample, checking names, terminology and any switches into English.

What does it cost in Ireland?

The table retains September 2026 global web prices where stated; Microsoft’s Irish prices and Google’s Irish student offer were checked again on 11 October 2026. Notion’s Irish checkout price was not verified, so no local figure is quoted. Check renewal and promotional terms before paying. "Not stated" means the vendor's own page does not say, not that the answer is bad.

Global web prices are a comparison point, not a promise about every local checkout. Fotheidil is included for its specific focus on Irish-language transcription.

Check the recorder already on your phone

Apple’s Irish guide lists Voice Memos transcription on iPhone 12 or later in English and nine other languages, subject to regional availability. Apple Intelligence summaries require compatible hardware and settings.

Google’s Recorder guidance lists English (Ireland) for live transcription. Pixel 8 and later can also summarise supported-language recordings with 5 minutes to 1 hour of speech, subject to the documented limitations. Re-transcription may use Google servers, and summaries use a cloud environment. Check permission for that processing too.

Which app should you pick?

If a module is taught through Irish, start by checking explicit Gaeilge support and a short sample. Fotheidil is a relevant option; an English-language transcription setting is not equivalent.

For everything taught through English, start with what your college has already bought. If your account includes Transcribe, the standard 300-minute monthly upload allowance equals six fifty-minute recordings. An education licence alone does not establish that entitlement. Then read the recording policy, because Irish colleges differ more than students assume, and a refusal to allow recording means working with your own notes and materials you are permitted to use. Permission to access a slide deck does not automatically permit uploading it to Gemini Notebook or another external service.

Compare cost against the specific gap left by the tools your college provides. A cheaper subscription is not useful if it cannot handle your language or the work is prohibited by your module policy.

The tool-by-tool comparison is in the best note-taking app for students.

If you are choosing between linked audio notes and material generated after class, see Genio or Notibo for Irish lecture notes. It follows one missed explanation through capture, correction and preparation for a tutorial.

Where Notibo fits

Notibo records a lecture, or takes an audio file you upload, and returns a transcript, structured notes and flashcards with spaced repetition. It also turns PDF, PPTX and DOCX files into notes and flashcards, which covers the slide deck and the reading. It transcribes 78 languages and the transcript comes back in the language spoken. Pro is free for the first 14 days, with 240 minutes of recording and no card. After the trial the free plan is 30 minutes of recording a month. Pro is 9.99 euro a month or 88.99 euro a year, billed in euro. Audio uploads are capped at 50 MB; document limits depend on format and plan, and one recording can run to two hours, saved in smaller parts as it runs and joined back into a single transcript.

On the data question the answer is split. Files are stored in the EU, on Supabase in Frankfurt. The transcription and the AI notes run on US processors under standard contractual clauses. It is not end-to-end encrypted, and the audio does leave the EU to be processed. If your requirement is that a recording never leaves the EU, that rules Notibo out, and most of the other pages here do not say where the audio goes at all. Ask that question of every tool you consider, confirm permission for both recording and external processing before you press record, and see the pricing page for what each plan includes.