Otter.ai automatically joins your meetings, transcribes everything in real time, generates summaries with action items, and gives you a searchable archive of every meeting. Used by 15 million users. Free tier: 300 minutes/month. Pro: $8.33/month (annual).
Otter.ai is an AI transcription and meeting assistant. It automatically joins your Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls, transcribes everything in real time, generates a summary with action items, and gives you a searchable archive of every meeting you have ever recorded. Over 15 million users have used Otter.ai, and it has transcribed over a billion meetings.
The core value is simple: instead of splitting your attention between participating in a meeting and taking notes, you participate fully and let Otter handle the record. The transcript and summary are ready immediately after the meeting ends. You can search back through months of meetings in seconds using any keyword.
In 2026, Otter added OtterPilot — an AI agent that joins meetings automatically, takes notes, and can join up to 3 concurrent meetings simultaneously on Business plans. It also added an MCP Server, allowing Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools to access your Otter meeting archive for deeper analysis and workflow integration.
Real-time transcription — Transcribes speech to text as people talk. Accuracy is approximately 85% on clear English audio with multiple independent sources confirming this. Drops in noisy environments and with heavy accents.
Speaker identification — Labels who said what in multi-speaker meetings. Requires training (Otter learns voices over time) or manual labelling in the first few sessions.
Automatic summaries — After each meeting, Otter generates a summary and extracts action items. Quality varies — summaries are most useful for straightforward meeting types (standups, status updates) and less reliable for complex discussions.
OtterPilot — AI bot that joins meetings automatically when they appear on your connected calendar. Starts transcribing when the meeting begins, stops when it ends, posts the transcript and summary to the meeting host.
Search across all meetings — Full-text search across your entire meeting archive. Find every time a specific topic, decision or person's name was mentioned across all recorded calls.
Otter AI Chat — Ask natural language questions across your meeting archive. "What did we decide about the Q2 budget?" searches across all transcripts to find the relevant discussion.
Language support — English, French and Spanish. This is a genuine limitation for international teams.
Professionals who spend significant time in meetings and need accurate records without manual note-taking. Sales teams needing searchable records of customer calls. Researchers and journalists transcribing interviews. Students recording lectures. Anyone whose work depends on accurate recall of what was said and decided in meetings.
Yes. The Free plan includes 300 minutes of transcription per month with a hard 30-minute cap per conversation. This cap is a real limitation — most business meetings run longer. Pro is $8.33/user/month (annual) or $16.99/month monthly, with 1,200 minutes per month and 90-minute conversation limit. Business is $19.99/user/month for 6,000 minutes and 4-hour limits.
Go to otter.ai and sign up free. Connect your Google or Microsoft calendar to enable OtterPilot automatic joining. Install the browser extension for Zoom and Google Meet if you want Otter to join calls automatically. For manual use: open Otter on your phone or browser and tap Record before a meeting starts.
Know the minute limits before relying on it. The Free plan's 30-minute conversation cap means Otter stops transcribing mid-meeting for anything longer. Pro's 90-minute cap covers most meetings but not all. Check your typical meeting length against the plan limit before the day you rely on it for something important.
Train speaker identification. After your first few meetings, label speakers in Otter manually. Otter learns these voice profiles and improves its automatic speaker identification over time. 15 minutes of labelling early on saves constant corrections later.
The 10 file import cap on Pro is a real constraint for content creators. If you need to transcribe more than 10 recorded files per month (podcast episodes, recorded interviews), you will need Business tier. Factor this in when evaluating plans.
Otter.ai was founded in 2016 and has over 15 million registered users, per the company's official website. It has transcribed over 1 billion meetings. The platform integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Webex via OtterPilot. An MCP Server launched in 2026 allows integration with AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. Transcription accuracy is approximately 85% for clear English speech per multiple independent testing sources.