Otter.ai: our review

Otter.ai joins a Zoom, Google Meet or Microsoft Teams video call at the scheduled time, transcribes the conversation live and posts a summary with follow-up actions at the end. The tool targets both the person who wants to review an interview and the team that wants to stop taking notes in meetings.

A bot that announces itself, not a spy

Contrary to a common belief about meeting assistants, Otter doesn't slip quietly into a call. It joins under a name visible to everyone — [First name]'s Notetaker (Otter.ai) — and posts a message in the meeting chat as soon as it connects, with the link to the ongoing transcript. An email can also go out to all attendees before the meeting to warn that Notetaker will be attending. On the Enterprise tier and with a Microsoft licence, the Otter extension for Outlook goes further: it blocks entry into a Teams meeting until the participant has clicked to accept being recorded. This is the most developed consent mechanism of the three tools we compared in this category.

What happens to the recording afterwards

This is where the picture changes. Otter's privacy policy states in black and white that it uses recordings to "train its proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and transcripts, which may contain personal information." No checkbox lets you opt out of this use, including on paid tiers. The retention period isn't quantified either: data stays "as long as necessary", a phrase that commits to nothing verifiable. The servers are hosted at Amazon Web Services in the United States, with standard contractual clauses for transfers outside the European Union.

Why it interests us anyway

For a sales department that must be able to prove, in the event of a dispute, that it properly informed each participant, Otter's consent infrastructure is worth a look: it's the only one of the three to combine a visible announcement, a chat message and an entry block. We mention it in our audit and consulting engagements when the question asked is precisely "how do we prove people knew". For everything else, its default training policy closes the door to use in the legal sector or at an accounting firm.

Where it falls short

Training with no opt-out is the main reservation: a firm or company bound by professional secrecy cannot accept that as it stands. The lack of a French interface is a second one for a team that doesn't work in English day to day — French is only one of the six live transcription languages, not an interface language. Lastly, US hosting requires accepting a data transfer outside the European Union, even if governed by standard contractual clauses.

Our recommendation

Otter suits an English-speaking team that wants solid proof of consent and accepts that its recordings feed a model. For a French firm bound by professional secrecy, or a team that wants to work in French day to day, look instead at Fireflies or Notta.