Otter.ai

Meeting-heavy teams

Otter pivoted hard into meetings and away from straight transcription, which makes it great if you live in Zoom/Meet/Teams and want auto-summaries plus action items — and slightly awkward as a pure podcast transcription tool. The free plan caps you at 300 minutes and 30 minutes per file. Only English, French, and Spanish, which kills it for international shows.

Otter.ai started as a transcription company and has rebuilt itself into an AI meeting assistant — OtterPilot joins your Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams calls, captures audio, generates real-time captions and a final transcript, then produces summaries, action items, and insights. For meeting-heavy teams it's a category-defining product. For podcasters, it's still useful as a transcription engine for recorded interviews, but the product's center of gravity has shifted noticeably. Pricing: Free includes 300 transcription minutes per month (30 min per individual conversation) with limited exports; Pro at $8.33/mo annual unlocks 1,200 minutes/month plus custom vocabulary and bulk export; Business at $19.99/user/mo annual gives unlimited transcription minutes with a 4-hour-per-meeting cap and team workspaces; Enterprise is custom with SSO, SOC 2, and API access. Real-time transcription, speaker identification, and shareable highlights work cleanly. The language limitation is the biggest gap — only English, French, and Spanish — which kills it for international podcast workflows. The 4-hour cap on Business is fine for meetings but tight for long-form interview shows. Best for corporate teams running on Zoom/Meet/Teams, sales orgs capturing call insights, podcasters in supported languages who don't mind a meeting-first interface. Wrong fit for non-English content or for teams who need a specifically podcast-shaped transcription tool.