Otter.ai is a well-known meeting transcription and notes tool. If you're evaluating alternatives, the right choice depends less on brand and more on a handful of capabilities — transcription quality, speaker handling, how it organizes content, and how you get answers back out. This guide gives you the criteria to compare options fairly.
We'll keep this vendor-neutral: rather than make claims about any specific product's current features (which change often), here's what to evaluate and how to test it yourself.
The criteria that matter
| Criterion | Question to ask | How to test |
|---|---|---|
| Transcription accuracy | How clean is the text on your audio? | Record a real meeting and proofread it |
| Speaker handling | Does it label speakers — and remember them? | Record two calls with the same person |
| Organization | Are action items and topics pulled out for you? | Check what it produces after a meeting |
| Recall | Can you ask questions across past meetings? | Ask about a decision from last week |
| Trust | Are answers cited to the source? | Look for inline citations, not summaries |
| Privacy | Is your audio used to train shared models? | Read the data and privacy terms |
| Platforms | Web and mobile capture? | Try capturing on your phone |
How to run a fair comparison
- Use your own audio. Demos use clean studio recordings; your meetings won't be. Test on a real call.
- Test the same speaker twice. Speaker recognition (naming a known voice) is more valuable than one-off diarization. See if labeling someone once carries forward.
- Try to get an answer, not a transcript. The real test is asking "what did we decide?" weeks later and getting a sourced answer.
- Read the privacy terms. Confirm whether your recordings train shared models and whether you can export or delete everything.
Where Remindr fits
Remindr is a voice-first alternative built around recall: it transcribes and labels speakers, learning voices over time, extracts action items and deadlines, and lets you ask your meetings questions with cited answers. Your recordings are encrypted and never used to train shared models.
See the head-to-head in Remindr vs Otter.ai, or compare Remindr with other popular tools: Fireflies.ai, Jamie and Notion. You can also read how AI meeting notes work and what speaker diarization is.