Otter.ai

Otter.ai started life as a real-time transcription service for meetings and interviews, turning spoken conversations into searchable, shareable notes across Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. That capability is still at the core, and for many people it remains the main reason to use the product.

The big shift came in April 2026, when Otter announced the Otter Meeting Agent and rebranded the whole product as a Conversational Knowledge Engine. Instead of quietly transcribing in the background, Otter now fields voice-activated AI agents: the Meeting Agent joins calls, answers questions, and completes tasks using a company's accumulated meeting data; the Sales Agent offers real-time coaching and objection handling on live calls; and the SDR Agent is a multimodal agent that can autonomously run product demos.

Alongside the agents, Otter rebuilt AI Chat into a private-by-default assistant with a ChatGPT/Claude-style interface, and turned Otter into both an MCP client and server so it can pull context from Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, and Salesforce. Otter for Desktop on Mac and Windows now captures audio and video from any app, not just supported video-conferencing tools. The company says it crossed $100M in annual recurring revenue.

Pricing stays freemium. Basic is free with 300 transcription minutes per user each month, a 30-minute cap per conversation, and 3 lifetime file imports. Pro is $16.99 per user monthly or $8.33 billed annually ($100/year), lifting you to 1,200 minutes a month, 90 minutes per conversation, and 10 file imports monthly. Business is $30 per user monthly or $19.99 billed annually, with unlimited meeting and in-app recording transcription, 4 hours per conversation, and unlimited imports. Enterprise is custom-priced and adds SSO, SCIM, an optional HIPAA add-on, and API access. Students with a .edu address get 20% off Pro.

The limitations are worth knowing. The free tier's minute and import caps are tight for regular use, the most compelling agent features sit behind Business and Enterprise, and letting an AI agent actively participate in meetings raises real privacy and accuracy questions that not every team or client will accept. Transcription quality also still varies with accents, audio quality, and crosstalk.

Otter suits sales teams, customer-facing organizations, and knowledge workers who run many meetings and want an assistant that not only records but retrieves and acts on that history. If you only need occasional, straightforward transcription, the free or Pro tier covers it without touching the agent layer.