Otter.ai

Otter.ai sits in the background of your Zoom, Teams or Google Meet calls and produces a real-time transcript with speaker labels as the conversation happens. After the meeting, it generates a summary and extracts a list of action items — not just a wall of text, but discrete "[Name] will do X by [date]" entries pulled from what was actually said. The AI chat feature is the part that changes daily workflows the most: after a meeting ends, you can ask Otter "what did we decide about the product roadmap?" or "who was responsible for the design revisions?" and it answers directly from the transcript. For distributed teams spanning time zones, that eliminates the need for anyone to take formal notes.

The accuracy is solid for standard English in a relatively quiet environment with reasonable audio quality — in those conditions it's genuinely as good as a human transcriber. The problems start when audio conditions aren't ideal: heavy accents, people talking over each other, strong technical jargon, or poor microphone quality all degrade the output noticeably. The privacy question is real and worth thinking about — Otter is a bot that joins your calls, which means your clients and prospects see it, and not everyone is comfortable being recorded by a third-party service. Some organisations have policies against it. The free plan at 300 minutes per month is generous enough to use for three or four meetings before hitting the limit, which makes it worth testing properly before committing to $17/mo.