Otter does meeting transcription and notes, and the help material is appropriately focused on doing that well rather than on pretending the product is something larger. The best sections are the practical ones. Microphone placement, dealing with a room where half the participants are remote, why a laptop in the middle of a table produces poor results and what to do about it. Transcription quality depends far more on the audio than on the model, and the material understands this and says so.
That is the guidance that actually improves outcomes. The archive search capability is underrated and reasonably well covered. Once you have a year of meetings transcribed, being able to find the conversation where a decision was made is worth more than any individual transcript. The material shows how to use that properly, and it is the feature that turns the tool from a convenience into something you rely on.
Honesty about limitations is better than average. The documentation acknowledges that accents, technical vocabulary, crosstalk and poor audio all degrade accuracy, which sets expectations correctly. Speaker identification is oversold relative to my experience, where similar voices and overlapping speech confuse it regularly, and the material is more optimistic there than it should be. The summaries are the feature I would treat most carefully.
They read fluently, which is exactly the problem, because a fluent summary that missed the one important qualification in a discussion is harder to catch than an obviously broken one. Anyone using these to inform a decision should read the transcript for the section that matters rather than trusting the summary, and the material does not suggest this. It also does not address the more subtle failure, which is a summary that captures what was said and misses what was meant. Consent is the omission that matters.
Recording a meeting involves everyone in it, the legal position varies by jurisdiction and in several places recording without all party consent is unlawful. The help centre offers a compliance note and no practical guidance on announcing recording, on handling someone who objects, on what to do when a bot joins a client call uninvited or on retention and who can access the archive afterwards. These are the questions people actually face, and the material's silence leaves users to work them out after an uncomfortable conversation rather than before one. Free tier limits arrive faster than expected.
Monthly minute allowances sound generous until you count how many meetings you actually attend, and hitting the wall midway through a busy week is the common experience. Worth understanding your real meeting load before choosing a plan. Three point five. Practical, honest material about the mechanics of getting good transcription, marked down for overselling summary reliability and for treating the consent question, which is the one with real consequences, as somebody else's problem.