Otter.ai: What It Is, What It Costs, and How to Turn It Off

What is Otter.ai?

Otter.ai is an AI meeting notetaker. It joins your calls, transcribes them in real time, and turns the transcript into a summary with action items, per otter.ai's own homepage, which now bills it as a "Conversational Knowledge Engine."

The company is independent, not a Zoom product. Otter was founded in 2016 as AISense by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, headquartered in Mountain View, California, per Wikipedia. It has partnered with Zoom since January 2018, and added Live Notes for Zoom calls in April 2020. That long-running integration is likely why so many people assume Zoom owns it. It does not.

Otter claims over 40 million users on its homepage. On Google Play, the app carries a 4.8 star rating from 38.9K reviews and more than 5 million downloads, fetched from the Play Store listing on 2026-07-16. It integrates with Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Slack, HubSpot, Jira, Notion, and several other tools, per otter.ai.

The core use case is built for rooms with other people in them: sales calls, lectures, interviews, standups, client meetings. It auto-joins from your calendar, transcribes live, identifies speakers, and produces a recap with decisions and action items afterward.

Is Otter.ai free?

Yes, Otter has a free plan, but it is limited. The Basic (free) plan gives you 300 transcription minutes a month, capped at 30 minutes per conversation, plus 3 lifetime audio or video file imports, per otter.ai/pricing.

Beyond that, three paid tiers exist as of 2026-07-16, per otter.ai/pricing:

Plan	Price	Minutes	Per-conversation cap	Imports
Basic (free)	$0	300/month	30 minutes	3 lifetime
Pro	$16.99/mo, or $8.33/mo billed annually	1,200/month	90 minutes	10/month
Business	$30/mo, or $19.99/mo billed annually	Unlimited meetings	4 hours	Unlimited
Enterprise	Custom (demo required)	Custom	Custom	Custom

Business also allows joining 3 concurrent meetings and gets prioritized support. Enterprise adds an "Otter Sales Notetaker" and custom CRM/dialer integrations. Otter's pricing page does not advertise a free trial for the paid tiers.

Some Google Play reviewers report a 25-conversation storage limit on the free plan, on top of the minute caps. That number is not on Otter's official pricing page, so treat it as a user report rather than a published spec.

Why does Otter keep showing up in meetings?

Because auto-join is on by default. Otter connects to your calendar and joins every scheduled meeting unless you turn that off, and real users describe this as the app's biggest problem, not its transcription accuracy.

On a Reddit thread discussing Otter for meeting minutes, one commenter wrote it "is the most invasive piece of excrement ever invented," describing how even after deleting an account, remnants persist on a computer and the link Otter sends to meeting invitees spreads further. Another called the removal process "impossible" and said "it spams all of your coworkers, bosses, etc... It feels very virus like."

A third commenter described it joining a job interview uninvited: "it popped up surprising both myself and the interviewer... it ruined that interview for me." One commenter summed up the default behavior plainly: "There is a setting in Otter AI that controls which meetings it can join. By default it is set to join all meetings."

These are user complaints, not universal experiences. The same thread includes a three-year Pro subscriber who said "I haven't found anything better than Otter yet (for me)." But the auto-join complaint is consistent enough, and specific enough, that it is worth fixing before it happens to you.

Other friction shows up outside the auto-join issue. One Reddit commenter described a UX bug where "the Otter tab/window, which contains the running transcript, suddenly clears and the content disappears, the moment the meeting ends." Google Play reviewers separately report the mobile app sometimes says it is recording, but "there is no audio or it's unavailable" the next day, while the web version keeps working.

Play reviewers also describe speaker identification mistakes, saying Otter "confuses people's voices, sometimes even men and women with dramatically different tones," which then requires manual cleanup on paid plans. None of this is universal, but it is worth knowing before you rely on Otter for something you cannot re-record.

Some workplaces have started pushing back on the auto-join behavior directly. One Reddit commenter working in a client-facing role wrote: "Most of my clients kick AI agents out of all meetings... They didn't sign NDAs." That is a real operational reason to default auto-join off rather than on, on top of the interruption it causes.

How do you turn Otter off or remove it from a meeting?

Type "stop otter" in the meeting chat. Per Otter's help center (article 14288936562199, updated 2 months ago as of this writing), this works in Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams chat, requires no Otter account, and removes all Notetakers immediately if more than one is present.

Other official ways to stop Notetaker mid-meeting, per the same help article:

1. Click the Notetaker link in the meeting chat, click "Stop Notetaker," then confirm "Yes, turn it off." This only works if the Otter account has Notetaker chat enabled.
2. If you are the Otter user, open the live conversation page or your homepage calendar, stop Notetaker there, and confirm "Yes, turn it off."
3. A Zoom host or co-host can remove Notetaker as a meeting participant using Zoom's own controls.

To stop Otter from joining future meetings automatically, go to Integrations, then the Meetings tab, then "Default auto-join settings," and select "Meetings I manually select" instead of joining everything, per Otter's help center. You can also disconnect your calendar entirely to remove all future auto-joins. One gotcha: events you already toggled individually keep their old setting, so review your calendar events after changing the default.

How do you delete an Otter account?

Go to Account Settings, then General, scroll to the bottom, and click "Delete account." Enter your password (or verify through Google, Microsoft, or Apple if that is how you signed in), click "Verify and continue," carefully review the confirmation pop-up, and click "Delete account" again, per Otter's help center (article 360047870454, updated 1 month ago as of this writing).

Before you delete, Otter's help center recommends four steps:

1. Turn off Otter Notetaker auto-join.
2. Disconnect your calendar.
3. Export any conversations you need, to text or audio files.
4. Review and cancel your subscription. Deleting the account forfeits all paid subscriptions.

Deletion is permanent, per Otter's official warning: it removes all conversations, settings, and account data from Otter's servers, shared conversations become inaccessible to everyone, and "Otter is not able to recover deleted accounts or conversations."

There is one gotcha that explains a lot of the Reddit "impossible to delete" complaints: the Delete account option is hidden if your workspace has 2 or more members. In that case, members and admins have to ask the workspace owner to remove them, admins must first be downgraded to member, and owners must remove, deactivate, or delete every other member before they can delete their own account. The official process exists and works, but it has prerequisites people do not expect.

A 2025 class-action lawsuit alleges that Otter records users' conversations without permission and uses them as AI training data, per Wikipedia. This is an allegation, not a finding, and Otter has not been found liable in this case as of this writing.

Is Otter.ai right for personal voice notes?

For meetings, yes. Otter is built around a calendar, joins scheduled calls, and outputs a transcript plus a meeting-shaped summary with decisions and action items. If your job is running meetings and you need a record of what was said and who agreed to what, Otter is a strong, purpose-built tool for that, and its 40 million-plus claimed users back that up.

For personal voice notes, it is the wrong shape. A free account gives you 300 minutes a month, a 30-minute cap per recording, and only 3 lifetime file imports, all tuned for occasional meeting capture rather than daily rambling to yourself. The output is a transcript and a meeting recap, not organized notes or a task list built from your own scattered thoughts. And, as the section above covers, you inherit a calendar-joining tool built for rooms full of other people, whether or not that is what you actually need.

Say what you actually want is different: catch an idea the moment it shows up, walking to your car, in a school pickup line, or at your desk mid-thought, and get back something organized rather than a wall of transcript text to sort through later. That is a different job than Otter is built for, and it is the job a mind that generates ideas faster than it can act on them actually needs done.

Full disclosure: InstantOwl is our product, and this is our blog. InstantOwl is not a meeting notetaker and does not compete with Otter for that job. It is built for the voice note you record about your own thoughts, not for transcribing other people's conversations. One recording turns into organized notes and tasks, not a transcript to sort through later. InstantOwl is currently free to use.

If you want other people's takes on meeting notetakers, Reddit users in the same thread named Fireflies, Fathom, Granola, Krisp, and Limitless as alternatives worth comparing against Otter for that specific job. If you are looking at voice note tools more broadly, our voice notes apps roundup and what is a voice note piece cover the personal-capture side of the field, where Otter also gets a mention.

Related reading

• Voice notes apps compared: more options if your job is personal capture, not meetings.
• What is a voice note: how sending and keeping voice notes differ, and where a transcript alone falls short.
• ADHD note-taking apps: where Otter fits, and does not fit, for a mind that needs instant capture.