Otter.ai

Editor's Review

Otter.ai is the meeting notetaker that grew up into an enterprise knowledge company — 35M users claimed, and the April 28, 2026 launch of the Conversational Knowledge Engine repositioned it from transcription to searchable meeting intelligence: an MCP server lets ChatGPT and Claude query your meeting history, AI Chat 2.0 pulls live data from Gmail, Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce, and July 21 brought Live Assist, a real-time coaching agent (Enterprise). There's even a desktop app with botless recording — no awkward bot joining your call. Pricing: Basic free (300 min/month, but a 30-minute cap per meeting and only 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account — a trap); Pro $16.99/month monthly ($8.33 annual) with 1,200 min/month and 90-minute meetings; Business $30/month ($19.99 annual) with 4-hour meetings and 3 concurrent sessions; Enterprise custom (Sales Notetaker, API, HIPAA option). Honest limits: even paid tiers cap single-meeting length (90 minutes on Pro); accuracy runs ~85–92% on clean audio, dropping on accents and crosstalk — below some vendor claims in the space. Who should pay? Meeting-heavy teams that live in the searchable archive — Otter's live transcription quality and cross-meeting Q&A are the draw. Who shouldn't? Volume transcribers: Fireflies.ai offers unlimited transcription on its free tier and Pro at $10/seat/month annual, metering AI credits instead of minutes, with CRM-first AskFred. Otter wins the live experience and archive; Fireflies wins volume and integrations. Read the free tier's 3-lifetime-import cap twice before committing.