otter.ai Reviews 549

The UX is clunky. You click upload a video, nothing happens, repeat nothing happens, repeat... Then you find you've used all 10 monthly uploads on two videos when you get ten emails.

The Complaints procedure is convoluted. There is no mechanism to recredit the 8 upload credits due to poor UX and poor workflows.

The AI bot refund procedure doesn't send you a copy of your complaint, the Complaint then disappears into a black hole.

After many complaints, all of which require me to know how I took out my subscription as they appear to have no records of how I did, I've requested their Ombudsmen details to escalate, but again been ignored.

I found writing the video audio by hand to be quicker. Apparently, you can train it to recognise voices and not jumble the speech all under the wrong speaker. Well if you haven't used your months credits on two short videos due to poor UX and work flows you could.

The time doesn't copy and paste, so again - by hand.

The product is painful, poor UX. Poor workflows, no Customer Service, No process to cancel or even confirm your not on auto renew. In three words: stressful waste of time.

I'd avoid - save yourself 7 hours wrestling with the non existant complaints procedure. 7 hours of your life you'll never get back.

I hate otter.ai. I want to get rid of it and stop it from logging into my zoom meeting. The recommended thing to do, if you don't want to read 26 (literally) of their help articles is to delete your account. If only I could login... Their is no, zero, zip, nada way to reset your password. Grrrrrrr....

First and foremost, I almost never leave reviews or go out of my way to publicly criticize a company, even when it may be warranted. I generally believe most issues can and should be resolved directly between the customer and the organization. However, this experience needs to be flagged because it has been one of the most infuriating and time-wasting experiences I’ve ever had with a company I’ve paid.

I genuinely enjoyed the service for a while, but things went downhill once they began limiting uploads.

Their software rarely captured audio from my Google Meet meetings - which is my primary use case. I went through multiple rounds of troubleshooting, but nothing consistently solved the problem. Eventually, I was forced to record meetings on my phone or another device and manually upload them afterward just to get the functionality I was paying for.

Then, despite the fact that I only relied on uploads because their core recording technology wasn’t working properly, they capped uploads at just 10 per month.

The most frustrating part was customer support. Both chat and email felt entirely bot-driven, leading to endless circular conversations where I had to repeat myself multiple times without ever receiving meaningful help or resolution.

Beyond frustrating. I genuinely wish I had never started using them.

It did a very good job of transcribing a very long meeting I trialed. Output was clear and unambiguous. I accidentally did not cancel the trial in time and support refunded me immediately. From this perspective customer support was excellent and I would use the product again.

Very poor experience. You sign up but they keep you limited to the free plan and 30 monute transcripts. A rip off, a poor product, impossible to contact customer service etc.

There are better complainies out there because honestly an ai company that can't even correlate its systems to subscriptions is redundant and poor. If they tell me to waste more of my day in the support centre I'll scream. You're supposed to make life easier not harder!

Be better!

Otter.ai is a FRUSTRATING company. They have NO PHONE NUMBER for billing issues! I was charged $88 for a cancled subscription and the phone number listed for them on the American Express transaction is no good - the call fails when the number is dialed. They state on their website that as of November 2025 they do not provide phone support, which evidently ALSO INCLUDES BILLING!!! They don't even provide an email address to use to get in contact with someone regarding a billing issue. SO BEWARE - if you have an billing problem with them, you're stuck. There's ABSOLUTELY NO RECOURSE!

This company. How does a company that literally has ai in its name not have api or mcp connections?? They literally make it impossible for any ai first company to function with their product.

--ALSO--
I went into my transcripts from a month and a half ago to view them and it WOULD NOT LET ME. I got a message that said "You've hit the transcription limit. You can get the full transcript using your paid plan minites." ........... WHAT? .............
WHAT A RACKET! I pay for the business plan (which is way overpriced for what it is) And they dont even allow you to view your full transcripts of calls anymore? A month ago I had no problem viewing this transcript, but now they are locking it behind YET ANOTHER PAY WALL

I would suggest that you run away from this company...at this rate they wont be around much longer anyway

I would recommend transfering your meetings to an external storage location, because this does not seem like the kind of company that should be trusted. You never kniow when you will be locked out of your own transcript data....

Incredibly useful tool, all of the features work great. It was unexpected how much use I got out of it, because I initially downloaded it just for a more accurate transcription experience but features like summaries, etc. were valuable. The desktop app is super handy. I will certainly be coming back.

Updated review: My request was addressed promptly and I was refunded an erroneous payment. Thank you!

This company is a joke, they don't deliver when you upgrade and support never gets back to you.

Absolutely appalling they took my money for pro account and it does not reflect in my app and it's impossible to get hold of anybody.

Disgusting in this day and age.

Support was frustrating. We had two users for a while and it worked well. When we added a third user, who was not admin, all recordings would go only to his account and we had to get him to release each back to us. BIG PROBLEM. But they would only email for two months. We spent hours documenting and trying to fix the problem with emails. After 20 or so email exchanges, someone on their side figured out what a new user was able to change to take over all meetings. Bad design, bad service.

Now it is resolved. Otter shows up well and is easy to manage. It makes excellent notes. Lots of features. As far as we can tell, we can not export the summary, only the raw recording. I will ask about this and expect they will send a generic email response with massive help files.

We support our software by listing to what the user asks, knowing our software, and responding with specific instructions if not fixing the problem from our side.

Product is a 4. Support is a 2.

"I am disputing the unauthorized charge of $180.73 on Feb 23. Your chatbot refuses to connect me to a human and ends the chat. I did not authorize any seat additions. Please process a refund immediately or I will initiate a chargeback through my bank."

Default setting sent out meeting notes to every attendee of meeting that I didn't consent to. Stay away from Otter AI.

I was signed up for Otter.ai without realising I had done it, and it also spread to other people in my organisation. It was difficult to stop it from inviting itself to my meetings and difficult to delete my account. There is something wrong with the way it is working to sign people up without proper informed consent.

I am happy with Otter because it saves me a lot of time at university. I play a video and get the transcript and the summary, it saves me a lot of time because I don't have to do manual note taking. Sometimes the sidebar doesn't work and I have to uninstall the plugin and install it again.

Hello otter you continue on to take money from my bank account even though I cancelled my subscription.You take whatever amount of money you want from R500 to R200 it does not make any sense.It proves to me that you are stealing people's money.Your website should be shutdown as it not reliable and fraud.I cancelled my subscription on the 9 May 2026 and you continue on to take money out of my bank account.

They are posting jobs on Upwork and tricking people to sign up to Otter AI, wasting people's connects. Deceptive and criminal.

Otter.ai has been charging my account $30/month for seven months ($210 total) without sending a single receipt or billing notification. I reactivated the account on July 23, 2025, for a meeting that the software failed to record. I cancelled immediately, yet charges continued. Support (Jennifer B.) explicitly stated that monthly receipts are "opt-in" only—a clear dark pattern designed to hide recurring charges from customers. Even after cancelling again today (2/17/2026), I received no confirmation email. This is predatory and bordering on fraud. I am demanding a full refund.

I tried it yesterday, but disappointed.
The note taking is good, but the summary in the android app does not show the actions! I had to login to web site to see them.
Being able to manage action in the phone is vital to me.
The help is not up to date, and there's no way to contact customer support from the app.

I hate this tool. The notifications are offensive, it's clunky, and it's darn near impossible to remove yourself from receiving meeting notes.