Use Otter.ai if you’re in uni Otter is a really straightforward site, and this made uploading my audio files and receiving my transcription very easy. I had to listen to 3x30min podcast episodes for an assignment and Otter.ai significantly cut down my planning, drafting and writing time. Have already recommended to friends and family. This review was submitted as part of a promotion from Otter.ai.

I love Otter.ai I love Otter.ai! I just found out about it recently. I have been using it for a month now and it has been really great help, especially during long Senate/Congress meetings. Taking notes in meetings didn't look so grueling any more with this tool. I also like their upload feature, where you can upload video or audio file, which it will transcribe. I would also like to disclose that I am writing this honest review as part of Otter's promotion.

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 at all. Summaries are not only useless, they are actually counterproductive. I was expecting the program to not understand what was discussed at all or to understand it partially. I was surprised to notice it quite often misunderstands it in the worst possible way, i.e. it reverses the meaning of the conversation. Imagine running a business on that!

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 call would have been).

Terrible Customer Service I’ve subscribed to otter.ai for quite a few years and, up until recently, it’s been an ok experience. It misses a lot of words, but I can usually figure out what they are. However, something happened with my subscription renewal this year, and even though I signed up for the premium plan, I keep getting a message that I’m about to use up my quota of transcript imports. With the program I signed up, for I should have plenty of transcripts left. I have contacted customer service numerous times about this. At first someone tried to help me but just couldn’t seem to figure out what was going on. Now they completely ignore every email I send. So basically I’ve paid for something I’m not going to be able to use soon because I only have one transcript according to them. Really bad customer service! I’m going to try to get a refund and find another company that pays attention to their customers.