Overview

Otter.ai is a aI-powered meeting assistant for transcription, summaries, and action items. It handles meeting transcription, ai summaries, action items, and search, and it's best suited for professionals wanting ai meeting transcription and summaries. It has been around since 2016, giving it a 10-year head start in building out integrations and refining the product.

The free plan is free for 300 min/mo — enough for most people to evaluate whether it fits.

Strengths

  • Includes Meeting Transcription as a core feature, purpose-built for transcription & ai audio workflows
  • Includes AI Summaries as a core feature, purpose-built for transcription & ai audio workflows
  • Free for 300 min/mo — generous enough for most small teams to get real work done
  • Includes action items alongside the core feature set — fewer separate tools needed

Weaknesses

  • Free plan exists but key features are locked behind the paid upgrade
  • Fewer built-in features means you may need additional tools to cover gaps
  • Ecosystem of third-party integrations is smaller than the market leaders in transcription & ai audio
  • Mobile experience lags behind the desktop version in features and polish

Quick info

Starting price
Free
Free tier
Yes — Free for 300 min/mo
Open source
No
Best for
Any size
Founded
2016

Last updated 2026-04-12

Top alternatives to Otter.ai

1
Descript Free tier

All-in-one audio/video editor where you edit media by editing text.

Free for 1 hour/mo · Free Podcasters and video creators wanting text-based editing
Text-Based Editing Transcription Screen Recording AI Voice
2
Whisper Free Open Source

OpenAI's open-source speech recognition model with state-of-the-art accuracy.

Free Developers wanting state-of-the-art open-source transcription
Open Source Multi-Language Local Running High Accuracy
3
AssemblyAI Free tier

Speech-to-text API with speaker diarization, sentiment analysis, and topic detection.

Free for 100 hrs · Paid from $0.37/hr Developers wanting transcription and audio intelligence APIs
Transcription API Speaker Labels Sentiment Summarization
4

Remote recording platform for podcasts and video with local recording and transcription.

Paid from $15/mo Podcasters wanting studio-quality remote recording
Local Recording Transcription AI Editor Multi-Track
5
ElevenLabs Free tier

AI voice generator with realistic voice cloning, text-to-speech, and dubbing.

Free for 10K characters/mo · Free Creators wanting realistic AI voice cloning and text-to-speech
Voice Cloning Text-to-Speech Dubbing Voice Library

Otter.ai comparisons

More Transcription & AI Audio tools

See all Transcription & AI Audio tools →

Explore more