Otter.ai

What it does

Otter.ai transcribes meetings in real time with surprisingly good accuracy for English-language conversations. It connects directly to Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, joining as a bot participant that records and transcribes without requiring any manual setup after the initial integration. The transcription engine handles most accents and speaking speeds well, typically landing in the 90-95% accuracy range for clear audio. Where Otter earns its keep is the automated meeting summary feature: after each call, it generates a structured recap with key topics, action items, and decisions. For anyone sitting through four or more meetings a day, this alone can reclaim a meaningful amount of time that would otherwise go to manual note-taking.

Who it's for

Otter fits best in meeting-heavy environments — remote teams, sales organizations running constant discovery calls, and journalists conducting interviews. The free tier gives you 300 minutes per month with a 30-minute cap per conversation, which is enough to test the tool properly across a week or two of real meetings. For most professionals, the Pro plan at $16.99/mo is the practical starting point, lifting the per-conversation limit to 90 minutes and adding advanced search across your transcript library. The Business tier at $30/mo adds team management features and a 4-hour conversation cap, which matters for all-day workshops or training sessions. If your work primarily involves non-English meetings, Otter is not the right choice — its multilingual support is limited and noticeably less accurate outside English.

Integrations and daily workflow

The platform integrations are where Otter becomes a habit rather than just a tool. Once connected to your calendar and video conferencing platform, it joins meetings automatically and drops the transcript into your dashboard without intervention. You can search across past transcripts by keyword, speaker, or date, which makes it useful as an informal meeting archive. The AI chat feature lets you ask questions about a specific meeting transcript, pulling out details you might have missed live. Speaker identification works reasonably well in one-on-one and small group calls, but becomes inconsistent when more than five or six people are on a noisy call. The mobile app covers recording in-person conversations, though sync times between mobile recordings and the web dashboard can lag behind.

The bottom line

Otter.ai does one thing well and builds a useful product around it. The transcription accuracy is strong enough to trust for meeting records, and the automated summaries genuinely reduce the busywork of documenting what was discussed and decided. The free tier is generous enough to form an honest opinion before paying. At $16.99/mo for Pro, it is reasonably priced for anyone who spends significant time in meetings and wants a searchable, structured record of those conversations. The main limitations are real but narrow: if you need offline transcription, non-English support, or music and audio production transcription, look elsewhere. For standard English-language business meetings, Otter is the default recommendation.