Otter is built around one situation: an English-language video call that its notetaker joins. Outside that situation people hit its limits. Its AI transcription covers six languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese. On the free plan a conversation stops at 30 minutes, you can import 3 recorded files in the account’s lifetime, and only the 25 most recent conversations stay visible. And some meetings can’t have a bot in them at all: a client who won’t accept one, a board meeting, an interview at a kitchen table. All figures are from Otter’s pricing page, checked 2026-10-25.
Meetings in the room, with no bot
Otter’s own apps record in person too, so a bot is not the only way to use it. What changes with an alternative is everything around the recording. SozAI never joins a call. You put a phone, iPad or Mac on the table and record, or you upload a file you already have: a voice memo, an interview, a Zoom, Teams or Google Meet recording saved by the platform itself. The transcript comes back with speaker labels and timestamps; you can rename the speakers in the phone app and on the web. Notes, a summary and tasks are made from it in the same place. How to get a recording out of each call platform is on our meeting transcription page; recording in the room is covered on meeting recorder.
The honest limit: SozAI does not capture a live call’s audio on the Mac, and it doesn’t caption a call as it happens. If you need live notes during a call, Otter, Fireflies and Notta’s bots do that and we don’t.
Meetings in other languages
Six languages covers a lot of offices and leaves out many more: Arabic, Russian, Turkish, Polish, Hindi, Korean, Portuguese. SozAI transcribes 99 languages and detects the language by itself. Accuracy differs by language, and we publish it: in our test on 200 read sentences the word error rate was 1.8% in Spanish, 3.6% in English, 5.5% in Russian, 7.6% in Turkish, 19.6% in Arabic and 50% in Kazakh. Those were clean read sentences; a noisy meeting will do worse.
Language detection looks at the recording as a whole, so a meeting that keeps switching between two languages is a hard case for it; try one such recording before relying on it. If bilingual meetings are your daily routine, Notta sells a bilingual transcription add-on built for exactly that.
For teams
Otter Business adds admin features and activity logs at $19.99 per user per month billed yearly. SozAI arranges Team and Education plans by email: write to [email protected] and we invoice the organization. There are no admin roles yet, so each person keeps their own account; see SozAI for teams.
