Otter.ai

What Is Otter.ai?

Otter.ai has evolved from a simple transcription service into a full-featured AI meeting assistant that aims to eliminate manual note-taking from your workday. It joins your video calls automatically, transcribes conversations in real time, identifies individual speakers, generates meeting summaries, and extracts action items — all powered by its proprietary AI engine. The company was founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and has grown to serve over 25 million users.

The core value proposition is straightforward: instead of splitting your attention between listening to a meeting and taking notes, let Otter handle the transcription while you focus entirely on the conversation. After the meeting, you receive a searchable, shareable transcript with AI-generated highlights. For remote teams that spend significant time in video calls, this translates to real productivity gains.

Otter operates primarily as a web application with companion mobile apps for iOS and Android. There is no desktop app — all transcripts are stored in the cloud and accessed through your browser or phone. This cloud-first approach enables features like real-time collaboration and cross-device access but means Otter requires an active internet connection and involves sending your meeting audio to external servers for processing.

Setup & Getting Started

Getting started with Otter takes about five minutes. Sign up with email or Google, connect your calendar (Google Calendar or Outlook), and authorize Otter to join your meetings. The calendar integration is the key setup step — once connected, Otter automatically detects upcoming meetings on your calendar and can join them without any manual intervention.

For Zoom meetings, Otter uses a bot called OtterPilot that joins the call as a participant. You can configure it to join all meetings automatically, only meetings where you are the organizer, or only meetings you manually select. For Google Meet and Microsoft Teams, the integration works similarly through a bot that enters the meeting room. Meeting participants see "Otter.ai" as an attendee, which can occasionally surprise people who were not expecting a recording bot.

We recommend informing your meeting participants that Otter will be recording, both as a courtesy and because many jurisdictions require consent for recording conversations. Otter adds a brief notification when it joins, but an explicit heads-up from the meeting organizer is good practice.

Meeting Integration Deep Dive

Otter integrates natively with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. The OtterPilot feature can join meetings on your behalf, even if you are running late or unable to attend. This "attend for me" capability is useful for managers who are double-booked — Otter captures the meeting they cannot attend, and they review the transcript and summary afterward.

The real-time transcription during meetings is impressively fluid. As participants speak, text appears in the Otter interface with minimal lag (typically under two seconds). Speaker labels are assigned based on voice recognition, and you can manually correct speaker names if the AI misidentifies someone. The live transcript can be shared with other meeting participants via a link, enabling real-time collaborative note-taking where multiple people can highlight key points and add comments.

After the meeting ends, Otter processes the recording and produces a final transcript with improved accuracy (the post-processing pass catches errors that the real-time engine missed). The AI then generates a meeting summary with bullet points covering the main topics discussed, decisions made, and action items identified. The summary is available within 5-10 minutes of the meeting ending, depending on meeting length.

Accuracy & Performance

In our testing with a variety of meeting types — one-on-one calls, team standups with 5 participants, and larger all-hands meetings with 20+ participants — Otter achieved 90-94% accuracy in clear audio conditions with standard American English speakers. This accuracy level is competitive with other meeting transcription tools and sufficient for capturing the substance of most conversations.

Speaker identification was correct approximately 85% of the time in our tests. The AI distinguishes speakers based on voice characteristics, but it struggles when two speakers have similar voices or when there is significant cross-talk. In meetings with more than six participants, speaker identification accuracy dropped to about 75%. You can improve accuracy by having each participant speak a few sentences at the beginning of the meeting, which helps the AI calibrate its voice profiles.

Accuracy degrades noticeably in challenging audio conditions. Heavy accents reduced accuracy to 80-85%. Background noise (typing, ambient office sounds, poor microphone quality) dropped accuracy to 78-83%. Cross-talk between multiple simultaneous speakers resulted in the worst performance, with accuracy falling to 70-75%. For best results, encourage participants to use headsets with built-in microphones and to mute when not speaking.

AI Features & Summaries

Otter's AI capabilities extend well beyond basic transcription. The AI Chat feature lets you ask natural language questions about your meetings — "What did Sarah say about the Q3 budget?" or "What were the action items from the product meeting?" The AI searches through your transcripts and provides answers with direct quotes and timestamps. This is genuinely useful for recalling specific details from meetings days or weeks after they occurred.

Meeting summaries are generated automatically and include a brief overview paragraph, key discussion topics, decisions made, and action items with assigned owners when identifiable. In our evaluation, the summaries captured the main points accurately about 80% of the time. The AI occasionally missed nuanced decisions or misattributed action items, so we recommend reviewing summaries rather than relying on them blindly.

The action item extraction identifies sentences that sound like commitments or tasks — "I will send the report by Friday" or "John needs to follow up with the client." These are formatted as a checklist that you can share with your team. The extraction is useful but imperfect; it sometimes includes statements that sound like action items but are actually descriptions of past actions or hypothetical scenarios.

Collaboration & Sharing

Otter is built for team collaboration. Transcripts can be shared via link, with configurable permissions (view only, comment, or edit). Team members can highlight important passages, add inline comments, and tag colleagues for follow-up. The commenting system is similar to Google Docs — click on any part of the transcript and add a note.

For teams, the shared workspace organizes all meeting transcripts in a searchable library. You can create folders for projects, tag transcripts by topic, and search across your entire meeting history. The search function works across all transcripts in your workspace, making it possible to find specific discussions from weeks or months ago. This institutional knowledge feature is particularly valuable for teams with high turnover or distributed across time zones.

Otter also integrates with several workflow tools. Transcripts and summaries can be automatically sent to Slack channels, exported to Google Docs, or synced with Salesforce. These integrations help ensure that meeting notes reach the right people and systems without manual distribution.

Pricing Analysis

Otter offers three tiers. The Basic (free) plan provides 300 minutes per month of transcription with basic AI features and Otter AI Chat. The Pro plan costs $16.99 per month (or $8.33/month billed annually) and adds unlimited transcription minutes, advanced search, custom vocabulary, and export options. The Business plan costs $30 per user per month and includes admin controls, analytics, usage reporting, and priority support.

The free tier is genuinely generous. At 300 minutes per month, you can transcribe approximately 5 hours of meetings, which covers 1-2 meetings per week for most users. The AI summary and chat features are available on the free tier, which is unusual — many competitors restrict AI features to paid plans. If your meeting load is light, the free plan may be all you need.

For heavy meeting users, the Pro plan at $16.99/month is comparable to competitors. Notta Pro costs $13.99/month with a 1,800-minute cap. Fireflies Pro costs $10/seat/month. Otter's unlimited minutes on the Pro plan make it the better value for users who transcribe more than 30 hours per month. For teams, the Business plan's $30/user/month pricing can add up quickly — a 10-person team costs $300/month, which is a significant expense.

Privacy & Data Security

All Otter transcription is processed in the cloud. Meeting audio is uploaded to Otter's servers, processed by their AI engine, and stored in your account. The company states that audio is encrypted in transit and at rest, and that data is not used to train AI models for other customers. SOC 2 Type II compliance is available on the Business plan.

For organizations in regulated industries, Otter offers data residency options and enterprise-grade security features on the Business plan. However, the fundamental architecture is cloud-based — there is no on-premise option and no way to process audio locally. Organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements or that prohibit sending meeting recordings to third-party servers should consider alternatives like Dragon (local processing) or self-hosted Whisper deployments.

Who Is Otter.ai Best For?

Otter is the ideal choice for remote and hybrid teams that spend significant time in Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls. Sales teams use it to review client calls and track deal progress. Product managers use it to capture requirements discussions. Journalists use it to transcribe interviews. Consultants use it to document client meetings without splitting attention between listening and note-taking.

It is particularly well-suited for teams where meeting knowledge needs to be shared beyond the attendees — the sharing, commenting, and search features make it easy to distribute meeting insights to stakeholders who were not present. Teams with high meeting volume (15+ meetings per week) see the most value from Otter's unlimited Pro plan.

Otter is less ideal for users who need general-purpose dictation (choose Wispr Flow or SuperWhisper instead), users who need offline transcription (choose MacWhisper), users who primarily need to transcribe pre-recorded audio files rather than live meetings (choose MacWhisper or Descript), or organizations that cannot send meeting data to cloud servers.

Alternatives to Consider

Fireflies.ai ($10-$19/seat/month) is the closest competitor, offering similar meeting transcription with stronger cross-meeting search and more CRM integrations. Fireflies is generally better for sales teams; Otter is better for general business use. Notta ($13.99/month Pro) offers superior multilingual support with 58 languages, making it the better choice for international teams.

For non-meeting transcription, Descript ($24-$33/month) combines transcription with audio and video editing, which is better for content creators. MacWhisper ($29 one-time) offers offline file transcription at a fraction of the cost. For real-time dictation rather than meeting recording, Wispr Flow ($8.99/month) and SuperWhisper ($4.99-$9.99/month) serve a fundamentally different workflow.

Long-Term Value & Verdict

Otter.ai is the leading meeting transcription tool for English-speaking teams that live in video calls. Its real-time transcription is fluid and accurate enough for practical use, the AI summaries save genuine time, and the collaboration features make meeting knowledge accessible to the whole team. The generous free tier makes it easy to evaluate before committing.

The main weaknesses are accuracy degradation with accents and poor audio, limited language support (English, French, and Spanish only), and pricing that scales linearly with team size. For multilingual teams, Notta is the better choice. For teams that need deeper CRM integration, Fireflies offers more connectors.

We recommend Otter for any team that holds 5+ video meetings per week and wants to stop losing information to poor note-taking. Start with the free tier, use it for a few weeks, and upgrade to Pro when you hit the 300-minute limit or want unlimited transcription. The productivity gain of being fully present in meetings while Otter handles the notes is worth the subscription cost for most professionals.