

Select some text and add a speaker name, then it does the rest.

It is good at speaker identification once it knows the names of the people in the meeting. Use good meeting management techniques and take turns speaking, using the ‘raise hand’ feature in Microsoft Teams and other tools so you can avoid talking over the top of other voices. It struggles when I speak quickly, and when people are speaking over each other. It’s not awesomely brilliant 100% of the time, but it’s good enough for what I need it for.

The transcription quality of Otter is good. Once I attribute a speaker name to a section of the text it can assign the right sections to the right speaker for the rest of the conversation. It sometimes struggles with names but it tends to get the conversation right. When I’m training or running group coaching sessions for Project Management Rebels, I often have contributors on the calls from many different countries, with many accents. I use a lot of technical project management jargon that relates to our projects and industry, and I don’t have to do a lot of editing. You can use audio input from the built-in mic or headphones (which is what I do), Bluetooth, and AirPods. It’s only available on the Pro and Business plan though. In fact, you can use this feature to add one-click insertion of any screenshot. If you know there is a recording where key comments are highlighted and you can listen back, then you can fully focus on facilitating the session.įeel like adding a bit of visual to your notes? You can drop your meeting slides into your Otter notes to provide context for the conversation and create a more comprehensive record. The great thing about Otter is that you don’t have to worry about taking your own minutes. Whether it’s training, a mentoring call, or a conversation with a client, sometimes it’s useful to have a transcript. It does a lot of things, but those are the buttons you will probably use the most. There is one button to record (for ‘live’ conversations) and one button to import recorded audio files or video files. Meeting participants can highlight, add comments, and assign action items as the meeting progresses. Otter records and takes notes for everyone with real-time transcription in hybrid team meetings. It creates secure and searchable notes from meetings so you always have a record of what was discussed.

Otter.ai is an artificial intelligence tool for productive, collaborative meetings. So what would life look like if it was easier to have meetings and take notes afterward? When I asked over 200 project managers what task they would most like to drop, meetings were near the top of the list (just after project documentation).
