Otter.ai review: the minutes, refund rules and recording consent you sign up for

What Otter does

Otter records and transcribes conversations. Its Notetaker can join Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls automatically, produce a live transcript with speaker labels, then write a summary you can query with AI Chat. You can also record in person through the mobile apps or import audio files. Paid tiers mainly buy more minutes, longer meetings, more imports and integrations such as Salesforce and HubSpot.

We read the pricing page, the terms of service, the privacy policy, the privacy and security page and the help-center article on cancelling. We did not record meetings with it, so we make no claim about transcription accuracy.

Minutes, caps and the free plan

The free Basic plan is generous on paper, with 300 minutes a month, but the 30-minute cap per conversation means a standard one-hour meeting is cut in half. Basic also keeps only your 25 most recent conversations and allows three imports for the life of the account. Pro raises the allowance to 1,200 minutes, 90 minutes per conversation and 10 imports a month, with unlimited history. Business is the first plan without a monthly meeting-minute cap, though a single conversation still stops at four hours and imports are limited to 6,000 minutes.

AI Chat, the feature for asking questions across your transcripts, has its own quota: 20, 50 or 200 queries a month depending on plan. None of these allowances roll over. Pro also limits a workspace to five billed users, so growing teams hit Business pricing quickly.

One more cap is easy to miss: concurrent meetings. Basic records one meeting at a time, Pro two and Business three, which matters if several colleagues share a workspace and their calls overlap.

Recording consent is your problem, not Otter's

This is the clause to read twice. Otter's terms say you are solely responsible for providing notices and obtaining consent from the people you record, and that recording laws vary by location. In the US, several states require every party to a call to consent before it is recorded. An AI bot that joins automatically from your calendar can end up in meetings you did not plan to record, including calls with outside guests.

Practical steps: decide which calendars the Notetaker may join, tell participants at the start of each call, and keep it out of meetings with clients, patients or job candidates unless you have explicit agreement. If you join an employer's workspace, the employer's own privacy rules also apply.

How your meetings feed Otter's AI

Otter is open about training its own speech and AI models on customer data. The security page describes an automatic de-identification step and says no human reviews recordings without explicit consent. The privacy policy is less comforting: it mentions training on transcriptions that 'may contain Personal Information', and it names a third-party data labeling provider among recipients of data. We found no switch to opt out of training. Imported Google Workspace documents are excluded from training.

Billing: no refunds, one pause

• Refunds: none for purchased subscriptions, per the help center and terms.
• Renewal: automatic. Cancel at least 24 hours before the billing date.
• Pause: available once, from Account Settings, as an alternative to cancelling.
• Mobile purchases: handled by Apple or Google under their refund policies.
• Disputes: the terms require binding arbitration and bar class actions, with a 30-day window to opt out after you accept them.

Our reading

Otter is a reasonable buy for teams that record routine internal meetings and accept the training terms. Pay monthly first, since there are no refunds, and switch to annual billing only once you know Pro's minutes fit. Students and teachers should use the .edu discount, which cuts Pro to $6.67 a month on annual billing. For anything sensitive, such as client negotiations, medical conversations or interviews, talk to Otter's sales team about Enterprise terms before you record, or simply keep the bot out of the meeting.