Solid and Useful Transcription We love using Otter.ai to record and transcribe verbal exchanges in Zoom and IRL meetings. The ability to go back and tidy up the transcription and match it to voices is great. It is definitely the best transcription software we have tried. We run a meditation coaching business, so having clear and usable text to hand off to clients is critical to success!

Quick review of what you missed I used otter.ai to record a coaching session with a coachee. After the session is uploaded I will be able to check out what other questions I could have asked but did not. It reminded me the areas I should look into for future sessions. This is important as I am still trying to improve my coaching skills for the ICF certification.

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.

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!

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.