Otter.ai is an American software company based in Mountain View, California that builds tools for transcribing spoken conversations and turning them into searchable notes. Its core product, Otter, listens to meetings, lectures, and interviews and produces a written transcript in real time, along with summaries and highlights that participants can share and edit. The company operates under the legal name AISense, Inc., the name it was founded with in 2016.
The product is widely used by professionals, students, and journalists who want a record of what was said without taking notes by hand. Over time the company has moved from straightforward speech to text toward what it describes as a meeting assistant, with features that join calendar meetings automatically, generate summaries, and answer questions about what was discussed. Its co-founder and chief executive, Sam Liang, previously led the location platform behind the blue dot in Google Maps.
What Otter.ai does
Otter.ai converts speech into text. Its software records audio from in-person and virtual meetings, transcribes it using speech recognition and machine learning, and labels who said what. The result is a transcript that users can search, edit, highlight, and share, which is useful for anyone who needs an accurate record of a conversation but does not want to stop and write things down.
Beyond plain transcription, the company has layered on tools that summarize a conversation and pull out action items and key points. Otter integrates with common video conferencing platforms so that it can capture meetings held on those services, and it offers free and paid subscription tiers aimed at individuals, teams, and larger organizations. The breadth of these features places it among the options covered in our guide to the best AI tools for business.
Founding and the AISense years
The company was founded in 2016 under the name AISense by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, two engineers with backgrounds in artificial intelligence. The early goal was to apply deep learning to the long-standing problem of automatic transcription, training the system on large amounts of audio so that it could handle real conversations rather than carefully recorded speech. The consumer-facing product was branded Otter, and the company later began doing business under the Otter.ai name.
Otter reached a wider audience in 2018, when the company announced a partnership with Zoom to transcribe video meetings and released a free mobile app for transcription. That year it also launched a version for college students, followed in 2019 by Otter for Teams, a product aimed at businesses that needed shared transcripts and storage. Those releases established the pattern the company has followed since, moving from a single transcription app toward a broader set of products for organizations.
Products and AI meeting assistants
The flagship product remains the Otter app, which records and transcribes conversations and presents them as live captions and editable notes. In February 2023 the company introduced OtterPilot, an assistant that can join meetings on a user calendar, capture the discussion, generate an automated summary of key topics, and take images of slides shared on screen. The assistant is meant to reduce the manual work of writing and circulating meeting notes.
More recent additions have pushed the product toward answering questions about meetings rather than only recording them. The company has added a chat feature that responds to questions using the context of a transcript, and it has built out integrations and tools aimed at enterprises that want to treat their accumulated meeting notes as a searchable knowledge base. These releases reflect a shift from passive note taking toward an assistant that participates in and reasons over conversations.
Who it is for and why it matters
Otter.ai serves a broad set of users. Individuals use it to capture interviews and personal meetings, students use it to transcribe lectures, and teams use it so that people who miss a meeting can read what happened. For businesses, the appeal is a consistent written record of decisions and discussions that can be searched later, which is harder to maintain when notes depend on whoever happened to be paying attention.
The company also sits at the center of an active debate about consent and privacy in meeting recording. Because assistants like Otter can join calls and capture conversations automatically, the practice has drawn scrutiny, including a 2025 class action lawsuit in California alleging that the company recorded conversations without proper consent. For founders and operators weighing transcription tools, Otter.ai is both a leading example of what AI note taking can do and a reminder that recording other people carries legal and ethical obligations.
Frequently asked questions
What does Otter.ai do?
Otter.ai transcribes spoken conversations into written text. Its software records meetings, lectures, and interviews, produces a searchable transcript with speaker labels, and can generate summaries and shared notes.
When was Otter.ai founded and where is it based?
The company was founded in 2016 as AISense and is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Who founded Otter.ai?
It was founded by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, two engineers with backgrounds in artificial intelligence. Sam Liang serves as chief executive.
What is OtterPilot?
OtterPilot is Otter.ai meeting assistant, launched in February 2023. It can automatically join meetings on a user calendar, transcribe the conversation, generate a summary of key topics, and capture images of slides shared during the meeting.
Is Otter.ai free?
Otter.ai offers a free tier with limited transcription minutes alongside paid plans for individuals, teams, and businesses that unlock more usage and additional features. Pricing details are listed on the company website at otter.ai.
Sources: Otter.ai company site at otter.ai, and the Otter.ai entry on Wikipedia. For an overview of comparable tools, see our guide to the best AI tools for business.