Otter AI Review: Does It Really Capture Meeting Decisions?

I tested Otter ai mostly out of frustration. Three different team members kept asking "what did we decide?" after the same call, and nobody had a straight answer. I was hunting for a free ai meeting summary app that would capture decisions without turning into a second job. Otter ai came up first in most searches, so it got the trial slot.

What I checked before trusting Otter ai

1. Live transcription accuracy. With two clear speakers on a Zoom call, Otter ai did better than I expected. It caught proper nouns like "Notion" and "Figma" fairly reliably. But the moment two people talked over each other, the transcript started guessing, and one of my colleagues with a heavier accent had their sentences rewritten in a way that changed the meaning slightly. Not enough to break a meeting summary, but enough that I stopped trusting raw export text.
2. Free tier limits. Otter ai gives you 300 minutes per month on the free plan. For my team of four, that seemed fine until we hit a week with five internal meetings. You can feel the limit, and it forces you to be selective about which calls you record. For a small team just testing, that's okay. For anyone treating it as an archive, it doesn't stretch far.
3. Action item detection. This is the part I was most skeptical about. Most "action item" features just flag sentences starting with "we should." Otter ai does a bit better — it caught "Can you send the spec to Maria?" and logged it as a real follow-up. But implicit tasks like "let's check the numbers again" stayed in the summary without a clear owner. I ended up adding a few action items manually.
4. Summary quality. The auto-summary cuts a lot of filler. It gives you a short overview, notes, and action items in one screen. I still edited it before sending it to a client, because the tone came out a little flat and once it included a point that nobody actually agreed on. I caught it because I had the transcript open. That editing step matters more than I initially thought.
5. Integrations. Connecting Google Meet and Zoom was simple, but the calendar connection silently dropped once and I only noticed because a scheduled meeting produced no notes. Restarting the integration fixed it, but I'd rather know when it fails than find out two days later.
6. Searchability. The one thing I genuinely liked: being able to search old recordings for a phrase like "budget" and land exactly on the moment it was said. That alone saved me from re-watching a 45-minute call.

If you're comparing against something lighter, I get it. Otter ai is a full transcript library, and that's both its strength and its weight. A tool like meetly is more focused on the result — shorter, cleaner summaries that you can share quickly without touching the raw transcript. For someone who just needs the top decisions from a 30-minute standup, meetly's approach often covers more of what you actually read after a call.

So, where does that leave you in 2026?

Otter ai is still very close to the best free ai meeting summary app for teams that want searchable transcripts and don't mind occasional cleanup. But a free ai meeting summary app 2026 comparison is about more than features. It's about how many meetings you actually have. If most of your calls are quick and you only need the highlights, a lighter option like meetly ai meeting summary is worth a second look. If you need the full record, Otter ai earns its place.

My honest take: Otter ai worked, but it worked better when I treated it as a draft, not a finished record. I'd use it again for a project with long, chaotic planning calls. I would not call it the best fit for a small team that just wants one clean summary per day and nothing else to manage. Try the free tier, run it on your real meetings for a couple of weeks, and check how much editing you actually do. That number will tell you more than any review.