Otter.ai

A cloud service for transcribing meetings and recordings.

Benchmark review. Giants are reviewed rarely, to show what the tools in the directory are measured against. This one is not listed in the directory, and it is an example, not a recommendation. Scores are our opinion on the six questions, based on public sources and dated October 2026.

otter.ai

Image from otter.ai, taken 2026-10-30, shown to help you recognise the tool. It belongs to its maker. Ask us to remove it.

Otter is a hosted service for turning recordings and meetings into text, so your audio goes to its servers to be transcribed. Its privacy policy lists “training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions” among the purposes it processes data for, with consent or legitimate interests as the legal basis, and it notes that these recordings and transcripts may contain personal information.

The same policy says data labeling providers use the data Otter shares to create training and evaluation data, and that AI, cloud, platform support and analytics providers can also handle it. It gives no specific retention period, only storage for as long as necessary or as the law requires. Power is a 1 because a company holds your recordings and sets the terms. We have not tested Otter. As of October 2026 this is our opinion, based on public sources, and if you spot an error, write to hello@toolsforconviviality.org and we will check it and correct it. Compare it with the tools in Dictation & transcription.

What stands out

• A hosted service that transcribes on its servers
• Its privacy policy lists training its AI on de-identified recordings and transcripts as a purpose
• No specific retention period is given