Otter.ai is an AI meeting assistant that joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet calls to automatically record, transcribe, and summarize conversations into notes with action items and outlines. It suits individuals and teams who want a bot-based notetaker that captures meetings without manual work, and it runs on a freemium model: a free Basic plan with 300 monthly transcription minutes, plus a paid Pro plan starting at $8.33 per user per month (billed annually).
Who builds it
Otter.ai is developed by Otter.ai, the company behind the transcription and meeting-notes platform of the same name. The product is built around live transcription and summarization rather than a broader workspace, and it has achieved a SOC 2 Type 2 report covering its security controls.
Core features
- Automatic recording & transcription — joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to capture and transcribe conversations, with AI transcription available in six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese.
- Speaker identification — labels speakers by name throughout the transcript.
- Automated summaries & action items — generates summaries with action items and outlines after each meeting.
- Live notes and captioning — real-time notes and captioning, available for Google Meet.
- CRM and workflow integrations — Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier integrations to push meeting content into existing tools.
- Otter API and webhooks — for building custom integrations and automations on top of Otter data.
Who it is for
Otter.ai fits individuals and small teams on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet who want an affordable, easy-to-adopt meeting notetaker without a long procurement process. The free Basic plan (300 minutes/month) is enough for light, occasional use; teams with regular meeting volume and a need for CRM integrations or the API typically move to Pro from $8.33 per user per month.
Data and privacy
Otter has achieved a SOC 2 Type 2 report against its security controls, but it is transparent that it trains its AI models on user data: per its privacy policy, "Otter uses a proprietary method to de-identify user data before training our models so that an individual user cannot be identified." That is a real trade-off compared with meeting assistants that do not train on customer content at all. Otter's published facts do not include a specific EU-hosting guarantee, so DACH teams with strict DSGVO data-residency requirements should confirm hosting region and a data processing agreement directly with Otter before rollout, and weigh the de-identified-training policy against their own privacy requirements.
Bottom line
Otter.ai is a solid, budget-friendly choice for teams that want a straightforward, bot-based meeting assistant across the major video platforms, with a genuinely free entry tier. The trade-off to weigh, especially for privacy-sensitive organizations, is that Otter trains its models on de-identified user data by default rather than excluding customer content from training entirely.