Otter.ai Reviews in April 2025: User Ratings, Pros & Cons

Charged Monthly extortionate rates

This service is a complete rip off, the service started out positive and then became useless due to the poor AI summaries of transcripts. After realising this was the case and I no longer had a requirement of this service as it added nothing to my workflow, they started the extortionate monthly bills. The highest was nearly $800 for not using anything. I'll never get this money back!!!!!

Lack of response from customer service

No response from customer service and have been unable to access account for 4 days impacting my business. Put in a ticket 4 days ago and no response. Somehow 2fa became required but I never got an option to set it up and now I can’t access my account and recordings!! UPDATE: 5/30/24 Otter.ai customer support reached out and addressed my support issue. Thank you Otter.ai!

Spammed every attendee in my calendar as soon as I signed up

I was testing a few different meeting notes services simultaneously. Within an hour of signing up, before ever having a meeting, Otter spammed every attendee in every meeting I had scheduled telling them to signup. This isn't "growth hacking," this is just old fashioned spam. I hope they fire whoever came up with this idea.

I used to love Otter, now it's beyond frustrating

I used to love Otter, been a paying user since it's early days. But despite some improvements I'm now getting fed up ss if I lose track of an active recording it will happily use up all my minutes recording silence. Leaving me with a week or more at the end of the month without the service I paid for a year in advance. This is not necessary. At the very least there should be a, settable, setting to shut off after a period of silence.

NO CUSTOMER SERVICE AND ROBS YOU

They do not have any customer support. They charged me for a subscription that I did not sign up for. DO NOT USE THEIR SERVICE

Otter wants all contacts and calendar info

Upon Google login: “Otter wants to access your Google Account [redacted] This will allow Otter to: • See and download your contacts • See and download any calendar that you can access using your Google Calendar You may be sharing sensitive info with this site or app. Find out how Otter will handle your data by reviewing its terms of service.” Upon clicking "terms of service" and searching for "contacts" and "calendar", the use of neither are expanded upon or even mentioned. What are you ...

Stopped recording automatically

My meeting was 10min late and the recording was crucial. Without notifying me, Otter removed itself because it was "too quiet" and ended up not recording one of the best meetings of my life, WHICH I NEEDED RECORDED. Honestly, what am I even paying for. 10min late start, everything gone, no way to know it wasn't working.

Customer service experience was positive (though slowed by being limited to email)

Just wanted to add a positive review saying that (counter to some of the reviews I read) I had a decent experience with their customer service team. Brittany was very helpful and relatively expedient in solving my issues over the weekend. Only giving 4 stars because there should really be a phone number for customer service as well if you're paying a regular subscription fee. The experience I had with customer service over email was good (though slower in resolving my issues that a phone ...

Limited usefulness

Useful to get the first, low quality draft transcript, which can then be corrected by a human. I can see a use case here, having spent a lot of time typing up my transcripts manually. It still requires a fair bit of work, but the editing interface is pleasant to work with - until it starts to mess with the text, trying to realign it with audio after I enter my edits. Then the transcript becomes uneditable for a while. Speaker recognition is a complete hit or miss. I would not rely on that ...

New plans are restrictive and no human customer services.

They changed the pricing plan which I did not see as I was away. Then billed for a year. The AI customer service bot says it is non-refundable and I cannot speak with a human. The package is not suited to my needs. I was disappointed with the accuracy levels and as I am 2 weeks past the renewal date I should be able to get a refund and cancel the subscription.