Otter AI for Meetings

What Otter.ai actually is

Otter.ai is a meeting transcription tool. You connect it to Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, and it joins your calls automatically, listens, transcribes everything in real time, and hands you a searchable text document when the meeting ends. It also highlights what it identifies as action items and generates a summary. No recording on your end required.

We tested Otter across six weeks of real work meetings — a mix of one-on-ones, team calls, and external client conversations. It handles more than we expected and less than it promises. That's more or less the honest summary.

Who it's actually for

Otter is most useful if you're in meetings where things get decided and you're expected to remember them. If you currently take notes during calls but find yourself typing while trying to listen, Otter removes that conflict. The transcript isn't perfect, but "searchable and roughly accurate" beats "whatever you managed to scribble."

It's less useful if your meetings are mostly casual check-ins, or if you work in an environment where people feel uncomfortable being recorded. Some colleagues will not be thrilled to see an AI bot join the call — you should be upfront about this before enabling it.

What it does well

The real-time transcription is genuinely impressive. Otter keeps up with fast speakers, handles accents reasonably well, and rarely falls far enough behind to miss a sentence. In our testing, accuracy on clear audio was around 85-90%. On muffled audio or heavy accents it dropped, but was still more useful than no transcript at all.

The summary feature produces a short paragraph capturing the meeting's main points. It's not perfect — it sometimes misses the actual decision while describing the discussion around it — but it's useful as a quick refresh before a follow-up call.

Search is the sleeper feature. Being able to type "budget" or "deadline" and jump to every point in the last three months of meetings where that word came up is the kind of thing that sounds minor until you've actually needed to track down when something was said.

The free tier is genuinely usable. You get 300 minutes of transcription per month, which is enough for most people's meeting load without paying anything.

What it doesn't do well

Speaker attribution is the main weakness. Otter tries to label who said what, but in group calls it frequently misattributes speech — sometimes to the wrong person, sometimes to "Speaker 1" rather than a name. If accurate attribution matters for your records, you'll need to manually correct a lot of it.

The AI-generated action items are unreliable. Otter flags sentences that sound like commitments, but it has no sense of context. It will mark "we should probably do that at some point" as an action item and miss "send me the brief by Thursday." We stopped relying on automated action items after the first week.

If you're on the free plan and use it heavily, hitting the 300-minute cap is frustrating. The paid tiers start at around £8/month, which is reasonable, but the jump from free to paid feels abrupt.

Verdict

Otter.ai does one thing well — capturing what was said in a meeting — and delivers it in a form that's genuinely useful for going back and checking. The transcript accuracy is good enough, the search works, and the free tier is enough for most people to try it properly before deciding whether to pay.

The AI features layered on top (summaries, action items) are useful but not reliable enough to trust without reading them critically. Treat Otter as a transcription tool that also generates a rough summary, not as a meeting intelligence system.

Best for: People who attend regular meetings where things get decided, take notes manually today, and want a searchable record without the effort. Score: 7/10. Verdict: worth it.