Otter.ai review

What Otter.ai is

Otter.ai is a cloud transcription and meeting assistant from Otter.ai, Inc. in Mountain View, California. It started as a voice-recording and transcription app and has grown into a "meeting agent": Otter Notetaker joins calls on your calendar, transcribes them in real time, writes summaries, pulls out action items, and lets you ask questions about one meeting or many with Otter AI Chat. Recordings and transcripts live in your Otter account in the cloud.

It works on the web, on iOS and Android, and through desktop apps for Mac and Windows. That spread is part of its appeal: you can record a lecture on your phone, upload an interview file, and have Otter join a Teams call, and everything ends up in one searchable library.

Key features

• Live transcription. Words appear on screen as people speak, which many users rely on for lectures, accessibility and following fast calls.
• Otter Notetaker. Joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet automatically from your calendar, records and transcribes, then shares notes.
• Botless desktop recording. Otter's desktop app for Mac (macOS 12.3 or later) and Windows (10 or later) records the audio playing on your computer without a participant joining. It can prompt you to record when it detects a Zoom, Meet, Teams or Slack huddle call. A Chrome extension can also record Google Meet without a bot.
• Summaries, action items and AI Chat. Automatic summaries after each meeting, and a chat that answers questions across your conversations (with monthly query limits per plan).
• Imports. Upload audio and video files for transcription, with plan limits on minutes and file counts.
• Custom vocabulary and speaker tags. Teach Otter names and jargon; tag speakers so it learns voices.
• Integrations. Zapier on Pro, Salesforce and HubSpot (with user limits), and an Otter MCP server so AI assistants can read your Otter data. Enterprise adds an API and webhooks.
• Mobile apps for in-person meetings and lectures.

Pricing

Prices below are per user, in US dollars, as of October 2026, from Otter's pricing page. "Annual" is the monthly price when billed yearly. Otter's page also shows first-time and regional discounts with footnotes; we list the standard prices. Students with a .edu address get 20% off Pro.

Strengths

• The live transcript is genuinely useful. Few tools put a readable, scrolling transcript in front of you during the meeting as well as Otter does, and users who are hard of hearing or taking lecture notes consistently value it.
• One library for everything. Calls, phone recordings, uploads and in-person meetings all land in the same searchable place.
• Cheap on annual billing. Pro at $8.33 per month billed yearly is one of the lower prices among well-known note takers.
• Bot or no bot. The desktop app and Chrome extension give you a way to record without a visible notetaker when you need it.
• Mature and widely supported. Otter has been around for years, works with the big three meeting platforms, and has apps on every major platform.

Weaknesses

• The free plan is tight. A 30-minute cap per conversation cuts most real meetings short, and only your 25 most recent conversations stay available.
• Auto-joining surprises people. A recurring theme in public feedback is Otter Notetaker turning up in meetings people didn't expect it in, sometimes after a colleague connected their calendar, and follow-up emails reaching participants who never signed up.
• Speaker labels are hit and miss. Users often report misattributed speakers, especially with crosstalk or similar voices, even on paid plans.
• Limits stack up. Minutes, per-conversation caps, import counts and AI Chat quotas all vary by plan, which makes it easy to hit a wall mid-month.
• Six languages. English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese; some competitors list far more.

Privacy and security

On its privacy and security page, Otter says it has a SOC 2 Type 2 report from an independent auditor, stores data on AWS S3 with AES-256 server-side encryption, bases its security policies on ISO 27001/2, and follows HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA practices. It says it does not sell user data and that its outside AI providers do not train on customer data.

Otter also says it trains its own models on recordings and transcripts after de-identifying them with a proprietary method, with no manual human review. The page does not describe a way to opt out of that.

In August 2025 a proposed class action (Brewer v. Otter.ai, N.D. California) was filed alleging that Otter Notetaker recorded meeting participants without their consent and used their conversations for training, as NPR reported. These are allegations; we found no ruling when we checked. Whatever tool you use, recording laws in some places require everyone's consent, so tell people you are recording. Our guide Is Otter.ai safe? goes into more detail.

Platforms

• Web app in any modern browser.
• Desktop: Mac (macOS 12.3 or later) and Windows (10 or later).
• Mobile: iOS and Android.
• Chrome extension for Google Meet.
• Meeting platforms for Notetaker: Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
• No Linux desktop app.

Alternatives

• Fathom: unlimited recordings on the free plan; a better fit if you mainly want video-call summaries.
• Fireflies.ai: more integrations and languages, aimed at teams. See Otter vs Fireflies.
• Read AI: meeting reports plus email and chat summaries.
• Bluedot: bot-free recording from a Chrome extension or desktop app.
• Hark (made by us): a desktop app for Windows, Mac and Linux that records and transcribes on your own computer with no bot, recognises voices across meetings, and is free for everything that runs locally; AI notes are $12 per month. It transcribes English only, has no mobile app, and on a Mac records the microphone only.

More options: Otter.ai alternatives, Fathom vs Otter and Granola vs Otter.

Bottom line

Otter remains a sensible default if you want a live transcript, cross-platform apps and low annual pricing, and you are comfortable with cloud storage and de-identified training. If you want a roomier free plan, look at Fathom; if you don't want any notetaker in the call or your audio in someone else's cloud, look at a bot-free or local recorder instead.