Otter.ai

Otter.ai is worth it if you live in remote meetings and want them transcribed and summarized on their own, without anyone taking notes by hand. It leaned hard into remote work meetings: it connects to Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams, transcribes everything live, and afterward delivers a summary with the key points and outstanding tasks, without you having to sit through the full recording.

What sets it apart from simply recording and running audio through speech-to-text is that Otter organizes that transcript into something usable: it identifies who spoke, flags moments where a task got assigned, and produces a navigable summary instead of a flat block of text. It’s also useful outside formal meetings: students recording classes, journalists recording interviews, or anyone who needs to reliably and quickly turn audio into text.

In practice

Its Salesforce and Slack integration makes it especially useful for sales teams who want client conversations documented automatically and available to the rest of the team without writing up a summary by hand after every call. For product or engineering teams, it means someone who missed a meeting can read the summary of decisions made in five minutes instead of asking for a recap. And for students, recording and transcribing an entire class lets them later search for a specific concept by keyword instead of scrubbing through the audio. It also works well as institutional memory over time: months later, anyone on the team can search across every past meeting transcript for a specific term or decision instead of relying on whoever happened to write the notes that day, or on remembering which call it came up in.

Plans and pricing (2026)

• Basic (free) — 300 transcription minutes per month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation.
• Pro (USD 16.99/mo, or USD 8.33/mo billed annually) — 1,200 minutes per month and up to 90 minutes per call, built for steady individual use.
• Business (USD 30/mo per user, or USD 19.99/mo billed annually) — unlimited live transcription minutes, a 4-hour cap per meeting, and up to 6,000 minutes of imported files per user, with collaboration features for teams.
• Enterprise (custom pricing) — adds SSO, SCIM, domain capture and expanded OtterPilot assistant features for larger organizations.

One important detail on any plan: unused minutes don’t roll over month to month, so it’s worth choosing a plan based on your actual monthly usage rather than the buffer you occasionally have left over.

For this review we tested live transcription during Zoom and Google Meet calls, the quality of the automatic summary with action points, and the Slack integration, comparing accuracy across speakers with accents different from standard American English.

What to know before choosing

The most real limitation is accuracy with imperfect audio: strong accents, several people talking over each other, or a noisy connection noticeably lower transcription quality, and a human review before trusting the summary is still needed. The free plan’s minutes also run out fast if your week has several long meetings.

Worth it for teams that live in remote meetings: it often pays for itself just in the time it saves on note-taking and writing up summaries. If your meetings are occasional or you already use Zoom’s or Meet’s built-in transcription, you probably don’t need a separate tool just for this — the gap between a generic call transcript and Otter’s speaker-tagged, searchable summary only really shows up once meetings pile up week after week.