Otter.ai Review
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Rating Breakdown
Otter.ai transforms meetings into searchable transcripts, automated notes, and action items. It’s become essential for remote teams and knowledge workers.
Accuracy
🎯88-92%
Transcribe Speed
⚡Real-time
Free Minutes
🕐300/month
Integrations
🔗10+
Core Features
Otter does more than simple transcription:
- Real-time transcription - Live captions during meetings
- Speaker identification - Automatically identifies who said what
- AI summaries - Auto-generated meeting notes
- Action items extraction - Pulls out tasks and deadlines
- Zoom/Teams/Meet integration - Joins meetings automatically
- Shared notes - Collaborative editing and comments
- Searchable database - Find any topic across all meetings
- Recording - Audio and video recording
- Export options - PDF, TXT, SRT formats
- Mobile apps - iOS and Android support
Accuracy & Performance
Transcription accuracy is impressive (88-92%) in good conditions:
Works well with:
- Clear audio
- Professional microphones
- American/British accents
- Standard vocabulary
- One speaker at a time
Struggles with:
- Heavy accents
- Background noise
- Multiple overlapping speakers
- Technical jargon (initially—learns over time)
- Poor audio quality
The AI summary feature is hit-or-miss. Great for straightforward discussions, but misses nuance in complex conversations.
Use Cases
Remote Work: Essential for distributed teams. Miss a meeting? Read the transcript. Need to reference what was decided? Search the archive.
Interviews: Journalists, researchers, recruiters benefit from automatic transcription and timestamps.
Lectures & Education: Students can focus on listening rather than frantically note-taking.
Accessibility: Provides real-time captions for hearing-impaired participants.
Content Creation: Transcribe podcasts, videos, interviews for repurposing content.
Pricing
- Free: 300 minutes/month (10 hours), 30 min/conversation
- Pro: $10/user/month - 1200 minutes/month (40 hours)
- Business: $20/user/month - 6000 minutes/month, advanced features
- Enterprise: Custom pricing - SSO, admin controls, dedicated support
Free tier is surprisingly capable for individual use. Teams need Business tier for full features.
✓ Pros
- • Excellent real-time transcription
- • Smart speaker identification
- • Native Zoom/Teams/Meet integration
- • Generous free tier (300 min/month)
- • Searchable conversation archive
- • Collaborative note editing
- • AI-generated summaries
- • Action item extraction
- • Mobile app quality
- • Export flexibility
- • Good value for teams
✗ Cons
- • Accuracy drops with accents/noise
- • AI summaries miss nuance
- • Speaker ID requires setup
- • Free tier conversation length limited (30 min)
- • No offline transcription
- • Privacy concerns with cloud storage
- • Learning curve for advanced features
- • Some integrations buggy
vs Alternatives
vs Fireflies.ai: Similar features, Otter has better UI. Fireflies has more integrations.
vs Microsoft Teams native: Otter more accurate and better search. Teams free with subscription.
vs Rev.ai: Rev more accurate but expensive. Otter better for regular meetings.
Limitations
- Privacy: All audio sent to cloud. Not suitable for sensitive/confidential meetings.
- Speaker limit: Free tier struggles with large group discussions
- Edit workflow: Correcting transcripts is tedious
- Integration quirks: Occasional sync issues with calendar/video apps
Verdict
Otter has become indispensable for remote-first organizations. The ability to search across all meetings, generate summaries, and never miss action items transforms productivity.
Accuracy isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that editing takes less time than manual note-taking. The free tier is genuinely useful, and paid plans are reasonable for the value delivered.
Best for: Remote teams, frequent meeting attendees, interviewers, students, anyone who needs searchable meeting records.
Skip if: Handle highly confidential information, need perfect accuracy, work primarily offline, or have few meetings.