what otter is
otter is a meeting transcription product. its core workflow is the otter bot — you connect it to your calendar (google, outlook, zoom, teams), and the bot joins your video meetings, identifies as a participant, listens, and produces a real-time transcript. the transcript syncs to a web app where teams can search across meetings, get summaries, share highlights, and turn talk into action items.
otter also accepts file uploads — you can drop in a recording and it transcribes it — but the product, the marketing, and the integrations are all built around the meeting-bot model. that's where their volume comes from. that's the audience they serve well.
what we are
audiohighlight is a file-upload transcription workspace. you drop in an audio file (interview, deposition, lecture, podcast, field recording, anything), the model transcribes it, you get back a workspace where you fix speaker labels in bulk, click any word to hear that second of audio, and export to whatever format your downstream work needs (.docx, .srt, .vtt, deposition format, NVivo CSV, jefferson notation).
there is no calendar integration, no bot, no auto-join, no live transcription of an active call. the tool starts when the audio file already exists.
which one fits you
otter fits if:
- you run a lot of internal team meetings on zoom, teams, or google meet and want them all transcribed and searchable across your team
- your meetings are not sensitive — internal company conversations, sales calls, customer-success calls, sprint planning
- everyone in the meeting either consents to a bot in the room, or doesn't have the option to refuse
- you want real-time captions and post-meeting action items more than you want a careful editorial transcript
audiohighlight fits if:
- your audio is a file (interview, deposition, lecture, podcast, field recording) — not a live meeting
- you can't put a bot in your meetings. this is the structural reason most of our users choose us: therapists with HIPAA-bound sessions, lawyers with privileged interviews, journalists with sources who refuse third-party recording, qualitative researchers under IRB data-residency rules, podcast guests with embargoed announcements
- you want a careful, citable transcript — speaker labels you can fix in bulk, every word linked to its second of audio, exports shaped to the downstream tool
- you want a privacy mode that runs in your browser without uploading anything (otter has no equivalent)
the underlying tradeoff
otter's bet is that meetings are the dominant audio shape and the bot-in-the-room is the right way to capture them. for tens of millions of users that's exactly right.
our bet is that the audio that matters most — the audio people pay individually to transcribe, the audio that goes into court filings, peer-reviewed research, published journalism, clinical notes — has a different shape. it's a file. it was recorded for reasons that excluded a bot in the room. it needs a transcript that's citable, not an action-item summary.
neither bet is wrong. they're betting on different audiences.
price comparison
otter pricing model: subscription tiers ($16.99/month "Pro", $30/user/month "Business", enterprise). meeting minutes are gated by tier. add-ons for AI features.
audiohighlight pricing: $0.25 per minute, pay per file. no subscription. no monthly minimum. all features included (bulk speaker fix, custom vocabulary, every export format, translation, summaries, private mode). a thirty-minute file is $6.00. a sixty-minute deposition is $15. nothing recurring.
for a buyer with steady weekly meeting volume, otter's subscription is cheaper per minute. for a buyer with bursty file-upload usage (a researcher with a quarter of interviews, a journalist with two big stories a year, a paralegal with monthly depositions), pay-per-file is cheaper because there's no subscription floor in the months you don't use it.
can you use both?
yes — and several of our users do. otter for the daily meetings, audiohighlight for the careful files. the two products solve different problems and don't replace each other. if otter is already covering your meeting-bot use case well, the question isn't whether to switch. it's whether your file-upload work needs a different tool.
switching from otter for file uploads
otter exports as .docx, .srt, .txt. drop those into our editor and we re-format without re-transcribing — so files you already paid otter to transcribe can still get the format-specific exports (deposition format, NVivo CSV, jefferson notation) without paying for transcription twice. you import the otter transcript, fix the speaker labels in bulk, click words to verify against your audio file, and export to whatever your downstream work needs.