Otter.ai: Price, Privacy and Meeting Notes

Otter.ai is a cloud meeting assistant. It records a conversation, transcribes it, labels who spoke, and writes a summary with action items. It reaches the audio three ways: a bot called Otter Notetaker that joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams calls from your calendar, a desktop app that records the call on your own computer, and phone and web apps for meetings in a room. The free Basic plan gives 300 minutes a month ¹, and Pro costs $16.99 a month ². Its recognizer averaged a 3.88 percent word error rate on 9 public English test sets in October 2026 ³, but it transcribes only 6 languages ⁴.

Two things decide whether Otter is right for you. First, the bot: once your calendar is connected it can join every meeting with a video link ⁵, and it keeps doing so until you change the auto-join setting. Second, the data: Otter keeps recordings on its servers, lists training its AI on de-identified audio among the uses of your data ⁶, and is the defendant in a federal class action in which a judge granted Otter's motion to dismiss only in part in August 2026 ⁷. The sections below cover each point with the evidence. For the wider choice of meeting tools, start with our guide to meeting transcription or the overview of transcription.

Otter.ai records meetings and turns them into notes

Otter's job is to capture what was said in a meeting and make it searchable. It is not a dictation tool for typing into other apps. You get a transcript with speaker names and timestamps, an automatic summary, and a chat box (Otter AI Chat) for asking questions about one meeting or many. The company is large for its category: it announced passing $100 million in annual recurring revenue in March 2025 ¹¹, and its iPhone app averaged 4.79 stars from 86,658 ratings on the US App Store in October 2026 ¹².

Three ways it captures audio

The route you choose changes who knows Otter is there.

Otter says Notetaker cannot join a meeting anonymously or without appearing to other participants ¹³. The desktop app is different: it records supported meetings without Notetaker joining as a participant, and Otter says the user is responsible for notifying participants and getting any required consent ¹⁴. That trade-off between a visible bot and a quiet recorder is covered in the question on meeting transcription without a bot.

Accuracy is strong on benchmarks, and meetings are harder

Otter's own engine, listed as OtterAI/speech-v3.1, averaged a 3.88 percent word error rate across the 9 public English test sets of the Hugging Face Open ASR Leaderboard in October 2026 ³. That put it ahead of Zoom's Scribe v2 Pro at 4.08 percent ¹⁵, ElevenLabs Scribe v2 at 4.55 percent ¹⁶, AssemblyAI's Universal-3.5 Pro at 4.87 percent ¹⁷ and OpenAI's open Whisper large-v3 at 6.66 percent ¹⁸.

Read the ranking with care. These are short English clips scored after punctuation is stripped, not your Monday stand-up. Real meetings bring crosstalk, laptop microphones and accents, and distance alone costs a lot of accuracy: on the AMI meeting corpus recorded with one distant microphone, Whisper Large V2 got 36.4 percent of words wrong ¹⁹. Expect Otter's meeting transcripts to need light editing for names and jargon, and check summaries against the transcript, because Otter's own help center says no vendor can guarantee an AI chat free of invented answers ²⁰. How benchmarks are built is explained in the guide to speech recognition benchmarks, and how machine and human transcripts compare in human vs AI transcription.

Six languages is the main gap

Otter transcribes English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese ⁴. Fireflies.ai lists more than 100 languages even on its free plan ²¹, and Google Meet's built-in notes work in 8 ²². If your meetings run in Portuguese, Hindi or Arabic, Otter is the wrong tool; see transcribing audio in other languages.

Basic, Pro and Business plans and their minute limits

Otter's free plan is a real trial, not a working plan for long meetings. Basic costs nothing ²³, but its 30-minute cap per conversation ⁸ means a one-hour meeting stops being transcribed halfway, and 300 minutes covers at most 10 full-length conversations a month ²⁴. Pro lifts the allowance to 1,200 minutes, and Business and Enterprise have no monthly minute limit ²⁵. Only Enterprise offers the HIPAA option ²⁶.

Prices and limits are from Otter's pricing page, read on October 27, 2026. Minutes do not roll over to the next month.

Annual billing halves the price of Pro

Paying for a year up front is the biggest saving Otter offers. A year of Pro costs $99.96 on annual billing against $203.88 paid month by month, about 51 percent less ³¹. Students and teachers with a .edu email address get 20 percent off Pro, which makes it $79.99 a year ³². Otter's own figures are the ones to trust: third-party reviews often quote older limits.

Cancelling stops renewal, not access

You cancel at least 24 hours before the renewal date to avoid the next charge, and Otter says subscriptions are non-refundable ³³. If you subscribed in the iPhone or Android app, you cancel through Apple or Google, not Otter ³⁴. After the paid period ends you drop to Basic, and older conversations are archived rather than deleted ³⁵. The full answer, with the free limits people hit first, is in the question is Otter.ai free?

How it joins meetings, and how to keep it out

Otter Notetaker joins a meeting because someone's auto-join setting tells it to. Connect a Google or Microsoft calendar and Otter can send the bot to every event with a valid Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams link, the broadest of up to 5 auto-join options ⁵. To stop it, change that setting to Meetings I manually select ³⁶.

Why people feel it keeps joining

Three mechanisms explain most complaints that Otter "spreads" through a company.

1. Auto-join stays on after people stop using Otter. Cancelling a paid plan drops the account to Basic, and Basic still includes the meeting bot ³⁷, so a forgotten calendar connection keeps sending it.
2. Per-event choices survive the change. Otter says events whose auto-join you switched on or off by hand keep that setting when you change the default ³⁸. Someone who turns auto-join off can still find the bot in a meeting they once toggled on.
3. Notes go to every guest. One auto-share option sends the recorded conversation to every guest on the calendar invite ³⁹. The class action alleges that these emails are used to get people without an account to sign up ⁴⁰, which is an allegation, not a finding. A colleague who signs up and connects a calendar starts sending a bot of their own.

Turn off auto-join for your own account

These steps follow Otter's help center as of October 2026, in the web app at otter.ai.

1. Sign in at otter.ai and open the Meetings tab on the home page.
2. Click AI Notetaker settings and choose Meetings I manually select. The same setting is under Integrations, Meetings, Default auto-join settings.
3. Open the home page Calendar and check upcoming events. Switch off any event that still shows auto-join on, because hand-set events keep their setting.
4. Under the same settings, set auto-share to Don't Share if you do not want notes emailed to guests.
5. To remove Otter completely, disconnect your calendar and, if you want your recordings gone, delete the account under Account Settings, General.

When it is someone else's Otter

You cannot change another person's settings. As the host, you can remove the bot: Otter says the host can take Notetaker out of the session at any time if a participant objects ⁴¹. Removing it ends the recording from that point, but anything captured before stays in the other person's account. Organizations that want a standing rule can set meeting policies that keep unauthenticated guests out, since the bot joins as a guest participant ¹³. Platform-level options are covered in Zoom, Teams and Google Meet transcription, and the step-by-step answer is in the question on how to stop Otter.ai joining your meetings.

Recordings, training and consent

Otter keeps your recordings and transcripts in the cloud, uses de-identified versions to train its models, and leaves the legal duty to get consent with you. It stores data in AWS S3 with server-side encryption ⁴² and says an independent auditor has issued it a SOC 2 Type 2 report ⁴³. Those are solid security basics. The open questions are about use and consent, not about breaches.

Your recordings help train Otter's AI

Otter's privacy policy, effective June 16, 2026, lists training its proprietary AI on de-identified audio recordings and transcriptions among the purposes for which it uses information ⁶. Otter says this training is automatic and that recordings and transcripts are not manually reviewed by a human ⁴⁴. The same policy also says it shares personal information with data labeling providers that create training and evaluation data ⁴⁵. The opt-outs it lists are for the sale of personal information and for targeted advertising; the rights section lists no opt-out from AI training ⁴⁶.

That is a real difference from some rivals. Granola's plan table lists a model training opt-out and deletion of audio after transcription on every plan ⁴⁷. How training on voice data works, and how to limit it, is in the guide to AI training on voice data and the question does Otter use recordings to train AI?

Notice to participants depends on settings you control

Otter tells users they must always ask for consent and say when they are recording others ⁴⁸. Its product gives notice in three ways, and only the first cannot be switched off.

Otter calls the chat message the primary mechanism by which Notetaker notifies everyone during a session ⁵¹, yet users can disable it, and people who dial in by phone may never see a chat message. The full answer is in the question does Otter.ai notify participants?

The law sets the bar, not the app. Under the federal Wiretap Act, recording is lawful when one party to the conversation consents ⁵², the rule known as one-party consent. California is stricter: its Penal Code 632 punishes recording a confidential communication without the consent of all parties ⁵³, which is all-party consent. Which rule applies can depend on where the participants are, so check the rules for each place. See recording consent laws and the question is it legal to use an AI notetaker without consent?

The 2025 lawsuit is past its first test

The case started in August 2025 with a federal complaint alleging that Otter's service, by default, does not ask meeting attendees for permission to record ⁵⁴. The suits were consolidated as In re Otter.AI Privacy Litigation in the Northern District of California, with a consolidated complaint dated December 5, 2025 ⁵⁵.

On August 13, 2026, the court granted Otter's motion to dismiss only in part, dismissing a federal computer-fraud claim among others ⁷. The central claims survived: the federal wiretap claim ⁵⁶, the California Invasion of Privacy Act claim, and the Illinois biometric privacy claims (the voiceprint law) ⁵⁷. A ruling at this stage treats the plaintiffs' allegations as true and decides only that the case may continue. It is not a finding that Otter broke the law. Institutions have their own reasons for caution: the University of Utah's guidance warns that recordings made with unapproved tools such as Otter.ai may be subject to public records requests ⁵⁸. See the question on why companies ban AI notetakers.

Health data needs Enterprise and a BAA

Otter says HIPAA compliance is available only on Enterprise, and that it becomes a Business Associate only once a signed Business Associate Agreement is in place ²⁶. Basic, Pro and Business are not suitable for protected health information. Clinicians comparing options should read HIPAA-compliant dictation. Whether Otter is safe for your situation, point by point, is in the question is Otter.ai safe and private?

How it compares with other note takers

Otter's strengths are accuracy in English, a mature mobile app and a generous paid allowance at the annual price. Its weaknesses next to newer rivals are the 30-minute free cap, six languages, a bot-first design, and no training opt-out listed in its policy. Fireflies and Fathom list entry paid plans from $10 and $16 a month billed annually ^{59 60}.

Prices read from each vendor's pricing page on October 27, 2026. "Not compared" means we did not check that vendor's language list for this page.

Which one fits

• Free use with long meetings: Fathom lists unlimited recordings on its free plan ⁶² and Fireflies unlimited transcription ⁶¹, where Otter's free plan stops each conversation at 30 minutes.
• Meetings in many languages: Fireflies, by its own count.
• No bot in the call: Granola, or Otter's desktop app. Remember that no bot means no automatic notice to others.
• Everyone already on one platform: the built-in notes in Zoom or Google Meet avoid a third-party service, if your plan includes them.
• English meetings, mobile recording and in-person conversations: Otter is a strong pick, especially on annual Pro.

The full field, including room recorders and platform transcripts, is compared in meeting transcription and transcription software. For interviews and research, read how to transcribe an interview, and for multi-speaker transcripts see timestamps and speaker labels and the term speaker diarization.

Otter is not a dictation app

People sometimes try Otter for writing by voice, and it is the wrong shape for that. Otter produces a transcript inside Otter; it does not type into your email, document or chat as you speak. For that you want dictation, and the free built-in tools are often enough. Mac Dictation lets you speak anywhere you can type ⁶⁶, and Apple says general text dictation on a Mac is processed on your device rather than sent to its servers ⁶⁷. On Windows, voice typing starts with the Windows key and H ⁶⁸. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows; it is built for writing by voice, not for recording meetings, so it complements a note taker rather than replacing one. The differences between these tools are laid out in AI dictation apps, dictation on Mac and Windows voice typing.

Who Otter.ai suits

Otter suits English-speaking professionals, students and journalists who want searchable notes of calls and lectures, and who are comfortable with cloud storage and model training on de-identified data. It is a weaker fit for long meetings on the free plan, for teams working in languages beyond its six, for anyone handling health data outside an Enterprise contract, and for organizations that need every participant's explicit consent before a recording starts. If you use it, set auto-join to manual, choose who receives notes, keep the chat announcement on, and tell people at the start of the call that Otter is recording.