Otter.ai

What Otter.ai does

Otter.ai transcribes meetings, lectures and interviews in real time, identifies speakers, and produces summaries with action items. Transcripts appear live as people talk, which makes it useful for accessibility, for following a call you joined late, and for interviews where you need to check a quote immediately. It joins calls on the major conferencing platforms, records in person through mobile apps, integrates with calendars and collaboration tools, and lets you ask questions across the transcript library. It suits journalists, students, researchers and teams needing an accessible written record. The limitations are accuracy and privacy expectations: transcription struggles with strong accents, technical vocabulary and several people speaking at once, corrections must be made manually, and the assistant joining meetings automatically has caused friction in organisations where participants did not expect a transcript to be created and shared.

How to use it

Sign up at otter.ai and connect your calendar; the free tier includes a monthly transcription allowance with limits on recording length. Decide immediately whether the assistant should join meetings automatically, because leaving the default on means it appears in calls you may not want transcribed. For live use, keep the transcript panel open during the call and use it to catch what you missed rather than reading it fully. Train the vocabulary list with names, product terms and acronyms early, as that produces a larger accuracy improvement than any other setting. Speaker identification improves after you tag people a few times. For recorded interviews, use the mobile app with the microphone close to the speaker; distance is the main cause of poor transcripts. Practical notes: allowances cover minutes per month and per conversation, exporting to text or subtitle formats is limited on the free tier, and transcripts need review before quoting.

Best for

• live transcription
• interviews
• lectures
• accessibility
• searchable transcripts

Strengths and limitations