Otter.ai Review

Otter.ai solves one of the most universal productivity problems: the meeting that could have been an email, but was not, and now you need to remember what was said. It joins your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams calls automatically, transcribes everything in real time, identifies speakers, and generates summaries with action items.

The core product is deceptively simple. Connect your calendar, and Otter's AI assistant joins your meetings without any manual action. After each meeting, you get a full transcript with speaker labels, a concise summary, and extracted action items. You can search across all past meetings, ask the AI questions about what was discussed, and share specific moments with teammates.

For sales teams, Otter adds CRM integration — automatically logging call notes to Salesforce or HubSpot and extracting sales insights like objections, competitor mentions, and next steps. This turns meeting transcription into actual sales intelligence.

We used Otter.ai across 40+ meetings over 30 days: internal standups, client calls, sales demos, and all-hands meetings.

Transcription accuracy in English is genuinely impressive — we measured 94-96% accuracy in clear audio conditions with native speakers. Accuracy dropped to 85-90% with heavy accents or poor microphone quality, which is consistent with competing tools but worth noting.

The auto-join feature worked reliably. Otter showed up to 38 of 40 scheduled meetings without any intervention. The two misses were due to calendar invite formatting issues. Once it joins, you see live transcription in the Otter app, which is useful for catching up when you join a meeting late.

AI summaries are the real time-saver. Instead of reviewing a 45-minute transcript, you get a 5-paragraph summary that captures the key decisions, action items with assignees, and open questions. The quality was good enough to share directly with absent teammates about 80% of the time — the other 20% needed minor corrections or context additions.

The AI chat feature lets you ask questions like "What did Sarah say about the timeline?" and get answers with timestamps. This is excellent for revisiting specific discussion points without scrubbing through recordings.

Language support is a limitation. Otter only supports English, French, and Spanish. If your team operates in other languages, you will need alternatives like Fireflies.ai or Notta.

Otter's free Basic plan includes 300 transcription minutes per month and 30-minute per-conversation limits. This is enough for 1-2 meetings per week, making it a legitimate free tier for light users.

The Pro plan at $16.99/month (or $8.33/month billed annually) increases limits to 1,200 minutes per month and 90 minutes per conversation. For most individual professionals, this covers a normal meeting load. The annual pricing at $100/year is solid value.

The Business plan at $30/month ($20/month annually) unlocks unlimited transcription minutes, concurrent meeting support (Otter joins up to 3 meetings simultaneously), CRM integrations, and admin controls. For teams, this is where the real value is — having Otter attend every meeting across the organization creates a searchable knowledge base of all company conversations.

The main pricing concern is per-user cost for teams. At $20/user/month annually for Business, a 10-person team pays $200/month. Competitors like Fireflies.ai offer similar features at lower per-user rates, though Otter's transcription accuracy and UX are generally superior.

One hidden cost: if you rely on imported file transcription (uploading recordings rather than live meetings), the monthly limits are separate and more restrictive — 10 files per month on Pro.

Otter.ai is worth adopting if you spend more than 5 hours per week in meetings and struggle to keep track of decisions and action items. The ROI is clearest for roles where meeting follow-up is critical: sales professionals, consultants, project managers, and executives.

Choose Otter.ai if you: attend 3+ meetings daily and need reliable notes, want automatic meeting summaries without manual effort, need a searchable archive of past conversations, or are a sales team that wants meeting insights in your CRM.

Consider alternatives if you: primarily need transcription in languages other than English, French, or Spanish (Fireflies.ai supports 100+ languages), want the cheapest possible meeting transcription (Notta and TL;DV offer competitive free tiers), need highly accurate transcription of technical or medical terminology (specialized tools like Rev or Verbit are better), or your meetings are mostly in-person without good microphone setups (Otter works best with clear digital audio).