Otter.ai

Otter is a hosted meeting product that starts with a recording or a meeting invitation, produces a live transcript, and turns the result into a searchable record. Its home page says it transcribes meetings into searchable knowledge, then uses that material for briefs, live coaching, summaries, action items, and follow-ups. The product has expanded beyond passive note taking: AI Chat searches meetings and connected apps to answer questions and create reports or follow-ups, while its workflow pages describe preparation before calls and output after calls. The scope remains meeting centered. It is not presented as a general enterprise search product or a universal task automation platform.

This focus matters for accuracy. Otter's terms describe a service that transforms recorded voice conversations into transcribed notes that can be searched and shared. The terms also warn that transcriptions and AI outputs can be incomplete or inaccurate, and require human oversight before relying on AI output. That makes the service a record and workflow aid, not a substitute for reviewing a meeting decision or a formal source document.

Otter offers several ways to collect the source conversation. It can join Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet meetings through its meeting notetaker, and its desktop application can record with headphones and no bot in the meeting. The Chrome extension also supports bot-free capture for impromptu Google Meet calls and transcription of media on websites. Mobile applications provide another recording route.

Those modes answer a practical concern for teams whose meeting etiquette or customer calls make an attending bot undesirable. They do not remove the obligation to obtain consent. Otter's privacy page says users must comply with local laws, ask for consent, and indicate when recording and transcription happen. The same page says a conversation is only accessible to the owner and people they choose to share with, subject to the product's sharing controls.

The standing free tier is Basic. It includes 300 transcription minutes each month, three lifetime audio or video imports, AI Chat within and across meetings, and the Otter MCP server. The monthly Pro plan is listed at $16.99 per user, with 1,200 in-app recording minutes and more export, search, and integration capabilities. Business adds unlimited meetings and in-app recordings, custom AI workflows, activity logs, and three concurrent meetings. Enterprise is a sales conversation rather than a published rate.

The free plan is usable rather than a time-limited trial, but the limits are material for regular recording. Otter's comparison lists a 30-minute maximum conversation on Basic, 90 minutes on Pro, and four hours on Business. The paid plan cancellation guide says direct subscriptions can be canceled anytime, but the paid features remain available until the current billing period ends and subscriptions are non-refundable. Teams should therefore distinguish the ability to stop renewal from an immediate reversal of the current charge.

Otter publishes a broad integrations catalog. Its own pages name calendar and meeting services such as Google Calendar, Outlook, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet; content destinations including Google Drive, Google Docs, SharePoint, OneDrive, Amazon S3, and Snowflake; and workflow tools such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Asana, Jira, Notion, Airtable, and ClickUp. The exact availability is not uniform across plans. The plan comparison places Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zapier with Pro, while Enterprise lists custom CRM and dialer integrations.

Data can leave Otter through exports as well as integrations. The vendor's help material says a conversation can be exported to Google Drive as a Google Doc or text file and lets the account choose included material such as the transcript, overview, action items, insights, metadata, or audio. Enterprise administrators can disable exports, so portability in a managed workspace remains subject to organizational policy.

Otter runs an MCP server at its own endpoint for compatible assistants. Its documentation says the server lets Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity, and other MCP-capable tools search meeting transcripts, analyze patterns across meetings, generate content from meeting data, and surface insights inside the other AI workflow. The server's documented tools are get user info, search, and fetch. The fetch tool retrieves a full transcript for a meeting or conversation.

Access is not anonymous or unrestricted. Otter says MCP access is OAuth authenticated with granular permissions and that an assistant can access only meetings the person explicitly authorizes. That is a meaningful permission boundary, but it is still a connection from an external AI product to meeting material. The documentation also states that setup varies by AI platform, and that using a custom MCP configuration requires familiarity with editing JSON.

Otter reserves several controls for Enterprise. The Enterprise page names SSO and SCIM integration, centralized policies for workspace permissions and content sharing, audit logging, and an account-manager process to keep an organization's data out of AI model training. Its privacy and security page says Otter has achieved a SOC 2 Type 2 report, uses AWS S3 with server-side AES-256 encryption, and offers two-factor authentication on all plans.

The public privacy policy gives an important qualification to the training claim. It says Otter may train proprietary AI technology on deidentified audio recordings and transcriptions, which may contain personal information. Imported customer data is treated differently on the privacy and security page, which says imported documents from Google Workspace are not used to train or improve models. Organizations that require a training prohibition should obtain the Enterprise opt-out rather than treating the general privacy language as one. Otter.ai Inc. identifies itself in its policy as a Delaware company with an address in Mountain View, California.