Otter: Transcribe Voice Notes Reviews

This tool has been a life changer for me. I used to struggle to write, and voice memos become my preferred method of expression. I hated having to listen to my voice to get a transcription, and the free voice to text service from word and google docs never got an accurate transcription (i have a tongue tie and don’t speak “properly”).

I have been using this app for a couple months now to help me write. It’s the best service i have found for the price, and i would recommend to anyone who uses voice memos to record notes or write. The transcripts are very accurate and the ability to make corrections makes this very powerful. There are playback speed options, and you can see in the transcript what word is which from the recording timing. I just wish i could take the videos of my livestreams and upload them for transcription, but i get around this by simply playing the livestream later, while this records the audio, or by recording the audio into this app while i stream. Such a great service! Wish i had this in college, i probably could’ve had the best lecture notes, as well as a cohesive strategy for essay writing via voice memo. Highly highly recommend, the free version is very useful so give it a try!

I’m in yearbook at my highschool and I do interviews all the time and this is the best app for the job, hands down. I still have to make edits to my interviews because the hallways can be noisy and the people I’m interviewing can be quiet and this can lead to Otter not picking up words or getting the wrong words, but I can’t really control those things. My only problem with Otter is that I cannot just convert it into a Google Doc straight from Otter , many school districts are moving to Google for their way of communication (Classroom, Docs, Slides, Gmail) and it would save me time because currently I have to put it in my notes app, then copy it, then create a Doc, then paste it in the doc. My guess is you guys have been thinking about this for a while and I saw that you guys respond to reviews somewhat quickly so I thought I would give a review.

P.S. Also, does a visual representation of the different speakers exist on Otter ? I would love to be able to visually know when speakers change, I understand how this would be hard because not everyone talks the same all day but maybe you could let us do it manually? Like my font would always be grey and other people talking (in my case it’s 1 person) would be another color. Alright, I hope this gets through to somebody who can at least think about it. Thank you for your time. Great app.

Okay, so I’m one of these people that hardly ever writes a review because either apps work they way they’re supposed to or not, in which case you look for ones that do, but I’ve been using Otter for the past 10 minutes and I can attest that the transcription part has been working perfectly (probably 95% accuracy). I only need to go back into it and edit a few words which they it gets wrong, but basically this will end up saving me hours of the transcription process — what makes it even better/easier is that as the words are heard spoken, it highlights the specific words so it makes it that much easier for me to make sure that what was said is what was transcribed and I can fix it on the fly right there if it is not. You gotta try this out for yourself to believe it. In my case, it was just me speaking into the microphone from wherever I was and my voice was pretty clear, plus it imported perfectly from Scrivener into Otter , I made corrections and instead of exporting it back into Otter , I got as far as right before importing and copied the corrected transcription to paste into Otter . If I had to do this for a living I’d be getting the premium service. Anyway, this truly works.

In these Covid times, many places of employment have switched to remote/distance communications via different platforms. In the world of education, we will be starting our school year remotely and as a teacher that is hard of hearing, I rely on lip reading. For years I have been looking for an app to transcribe speech to text. I have downloaded tons and paid for more than I’m embarrassed to admit. Today. My life was changed. 5 minutes before a scheduled online training, I threw up a Hail Mary and downloaded this app. I pushed record and waited for the usual transcript...which is usually: what.....come......no.......books. To my huge surprise this app immediately begin transcribing the speech of the presenter word for word. I couldn’t believe it. I used it for the entire 8 hours of my training today. Best app I have ever used. It was FREE AND it saved every single transcription that it recorded. I can’t thank this company enough or sing it’s praises enough. I can now participate, ask questions, give feedback via online classrooms only bc of this app! Download it....it is so worth it. Excited to try it in meetings, drs offices, etc! Thank you this app! Thank you!

Believe me when I tell you I am a connoisseur of speech to text voice recognition. I have been using dragon anywhere but will cancel that account to use this one. My suggestions would be to make it so that I can use my Apple Watch with this. That would seem to make sense since it is designed to handle multiple conversations which the Apple Watch could be the intake for. The other suggestion, which is more important to me, is to simplify the process by which I can export the text to Notes. Having to click continue every time is a nuisance. My congratulations to the developers. Also because I have been doing so much speak to text voice recognition I routinely say the word Period. I also say the words new paragraph. This is not a big issue but perhaps you might allow for a setting that permits me to say these words and have them activate commands. And I think it is amazing that I can just leave it on and it only records when I start speaking. I hated it when dragon anywhere would stop recording on its own. Take-home message: make it easier to copy to notes. Make it easier to share. You still get five stars.

I’ve been transcribing for a couple years but I’ve usually only don’t small segments. Most were just small snippets of audio and never the full version. I recently accepted an offer from a client who required full transcription of her interviews, some of which, are over an hour. I was 15 mins into transcribing and I was exhausted. I did some googling tried Google Docs but it was complete trash. I found this app and downloaded it on my phone at first. I played the audio on my computer and recorded it on my phone. I thought I hit the jackpot. Once it was done, I emailed it to myself. I got on my computer to open it and it made me sign in online. This is where I discovered that I could just upload the audio file and it would process it for me! Then by pure accident, I realized I could play it and it would highlight the words as it played. I would say it’s about 90% right. I love that we can assign speakers and timestamps. Then when we export it into word, you can choose to keep the speakers and timestamps or remove them. This has cut my transcribing time down extremely!! Saving me hours!! Love love love!

It’s hard to believe that someone came up with an app that is exactly what I needed and has features far beyond what I expected. I’m constantly being surprised by what I can do with Otter. Transcribing from voice to text is just the beginning of its capabilities and usages. I’m now composing wide range of content and refining them using the transcriptions in unexpected ways. For example: I will transcribe a lot of random subjects or thoughts and string them together into a document from which I then create a narration that reads like I had spent hours composing it, when it only took me a few minutes. That’s an incredible shortcut for content creation.

The transcription isn’t perfect but it’s really good and can be enhanced by adding your own vocabulary words which I think is incredibly important. I absolutely love Otter! It may be the best app that I’ve ever downloaded.

I highly recommend the upgrade. It increases the functionality by a factor of 10x.

I was trying to take notes from podcasts and I would have to keep going back over and over again to try to make sure I wrote everything down correctly. (I’m 54 so my retention of things isn’t as good as it used to be). After struggling with this problem for a couple of weeks and wasting too much time, I started wondering if there was an easier way. I started searching the tech websites for speech to text options and Otter was one that was recommended so I gave it a try. I also needed something that was cheap or free right now because I’m unemployed and not receiving any unemployment compensation so money is tight. There are a few words that I have corrected that were close to what was said but it’s not a whole lot. In a perfect world everything would work perfectly but since it’s not a perfect world, correcting a few words isn’t a problem. I am using the free version now but as soon as I’m able to find a job, I will be upgrading.

Thank you for creating Otter. It is what the deaf and hearing-impaired community needs. I wear hearing aids and today, I went to Bible study and discovered that I had left my hearing aids at home. My pastor is soft-spoken so I began to search for real-time transcription apps and came across your app. I wasn’t expecting much from it as previous apps I had tried in the past had been terrible. About 5 minutes into using your app, I became convinced that Otter is revolutionary: I was blown away by the speed and accuracy of the transcriptions. I used it throughout the two-hour Bible study and the transcription kept up in speed and accuracy. I am very impressed. Please, market Otter to the deaf and hearing-impaired community because it is needed. A potential market for you is to find a way for cellphone calls to be transcribed real-time for deaf and hearing-impaired people. There is company that offers this service but their transcriptions are very, very bad. Thanks and I am happy to join your customer base.

this app is superior to any of its competitors (I’ve used all premium auto transcription apps available for Mac currently available l). Outstanding features: this app’s auto transcription is both faster and more accurate in compared to its competitors and it does a surprisingly good job with punctuation. It really shines on iOS—on iPad I arrange split screen view so this app is in one pane and the Google doc I’m working in another; I can listen and control audio on my iPhone while editing, fact checking and formatting on the iPad or Mac full screen. “Tag” (name) a speaker once and this app will update the speaker’s name on that transcript...and the next time (whether a month or a year later) that speaker is on an audio recording, this app will recognize and tag the speaker (on the rare occasions it selects the wrong speaker, correction takes seconds). The free version offers a generous number of minutes but limits choices for playback speed; the paid version is worth it’s relatively low fee. Thanks this app!

This was a really great app. I used it all the time for phone interviews. Suddenly I try to import an mp3 from my recorder and it won’t work. I updated, and now it says there is a limit on imports for basic accounts (like 3 I guess). I’ve only used 14 of 600 minutes for the month (one file)! I usually only import a few a month. It says you can record directly without paying, but 1. It doesn’t record phone calls (which I am legally recording as interviews to transcribe with their knowledge), and 2. I already have the files, so I’m stuck. I’m on a time crunch so I either pay or find another app.

If I had gotten a warning, I could have tried recording using my iPad and the phone speaker, but no notification it was going to suddenly stop working. So now I’m just stuck with mp3s I can’t import.

Really uncool to do to your customers. You should have at the very least given a heads up. I get you want money, but that’s crappy to do to your customers. It’s also way too expensive if you only upload a couple per month. Why not offer a package you can buy? Like if I could buy X amount of transcripts for $10, I would consider doing that.

As a writer I often wake up inspired by switcher dreams or whatever it is our brains do during sleep. My whole life it’s been a groaning struggle between sleep, or breakfast, and capturing my inspiration when it is fresh and clear, this app fixed this, because reaching iPad with half closed eyes and clicking record, then mumbling through my new material take sthe keast amount of effort ever. And the frustration of having an hour of deciphering what was transcribed because this app gets it 90% right—usually only stumbling over new terminology or character names, and not recognizing a long pause as a comma not a period. But I do see it learning, both my character names and commonly used but u usual words. I’m not sure if that’s because I edit before exporting text, or some other voodoo. Also I have pain in my hands after too much thumb, or even finger, typing and this minimized the need for that. Anyway, thank you little this app.

Otter is incredible! I conduct many interviews and meetings and WOW, Otter has made my work so much more efficient! The accuracy is impeccable, even when the people speaking have thick accents or soft voices. You can highlight text, play back the audio in sync with the corresponding transcription segment, and even go in and edit mistakes, name the different speakers, etc. You can record straight into Otter or import recordings (if you have premium, which I have, though is definitely not necessary for getting good use out of Otter). I can’t think of one issue (obviously the transcriptions aren’t perfect and there are still many small things to tweak but I think the accuracy of Otter is so much better than many others I have tried). The sleek design and easy accessibility and usability is the cherry on top. Thank you SO much for Otter!!! One of the best productivity tools out there👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

I currently serve on several non-profit organizations and was concerned about being able to participate in Zoom calls this year. Closed captioning services are cost prohibitive and I find them to be frustrating especially if the captioner usually is a court reporter who has installed legal jargon that often pops up but is not relevant to the conversation. An online class I was taking was using this app and I was duly impressed with it. And because it was a class it allowed me to go back and read over the transcripts for review.

I now am considering a premium membership but really hope to survive on a basic membership since I do not have a regular income to sustain a paid one but have been asking my non-profit boards to invest: it is still very reasonable.

Thank you and I look forward to great improvements as technology continues to grow.

Otter is PHENOMENAL.

I’m deaf, wear hearing aids, and while I can talk well, I have to read lips in order to understand what the person is saying. Just to give you some context.

With that said, Otter has KICKED open a door in my career! I work as content strategist and handle media relations for a marketing firm. Meetings have always been a challenge for me because the more people involved in a conversation, the more likely it is that I’ll miss what’s being said. And there’s a lot at stake when it comes to clients. Then, staff meetings can be difficult because one of the employees I work with the most is a remote employee and she reports in over the phone.

Enter this app.

I can’t tell you guys how much this has changed things for me! It’s quick, it’s really pretty accurate (just make sure the microphone is positioned just right!), and it’s rendered correctly! I love Otter I love it I love it. My boss is considering springing for the paid plans after seeing how much easier this has made my life.

I’m a better employee and a happier person for this.

If you could just include a real-time transcription service for calls made on cell phones to your roadmap....you would be killing it. There are NO services for the Deaf that do what this app does with the same speed and accuracy!

Keep up the good work. You have made a serious and fervent fan out of me. Thank you for helping me on so many levels.

The accuracy of Otter is the best out of all the transcription services I have tried. Obviously it’s not perfect, but it’s surprisingly good even given less than ideal background noise.

Some suggestions that would make this extremely valuable for me:

1. Recording via Apple Watch. I currently have to use an app called Just Press Record to record on my watch and synchronize to my phone, and then manually import those recordings into this app. It would be better if I could have an this app app on my Apple Watch and record through Otter . It doesn’t even need to be real time.

2. Developer API. As a software developer I currently build integrations with the Google speech recognition API, which is not nearly as good as this app. I talked with the this app team at a conference recently and they said they have no intentions to release a developer API, which is a shame. Please reconsider! I would happily pay for developer access to your amazing speech recognition system.

3. Integration with Spotlight. Transcriptions should be indexed so I can search them via iOS.

4. I love that they added custom vocabulary in the most recent update! But currently it's all manual. It would be great if it preloaded the person contact list vocabulary with my phone's address book, and maybe infer the rest of the vocabulary from my Messages/Gmail/other data the way SwiftKey does.

I use Otter for classes. Much of the vocabulary is unique to the course of study and is often distorted by other speech to text options. this app gets it right almost every time and it seems to have improved as I used it. I noticed that it corrects the text on the fly. I don’t know if someone is listening or if it is real ai contextualizing the speech to find the appropriate solution but, whatever it is, I love the service. I pay when I need to and drop the paid option when I no longer need it. I would not have paid for Otter at all if they tried to force me into a one year plan at the current rate.

Here’s what I would like to see:
Integration with Evernote and other note options. I don’t like having to have my notes held hostage in Otter. I paid for the service when I needed it but cannot now export those notes. I don’t need to keep my current notes but this will impact my long term thinking.

I’ve recently started using Otter for conducting interviews at my school, since I’m apart of the newspaper club, and It’s super convenient! However, theres been some weird glitches and bugs that have been making Otter hard to use. First, whenever I highlight text in the transcript, I can’t un-highlight it and it gets pretty annoying. It also never highlights what I want, and always messes up my text. Another thing is that when you sort a recording into a folder, you can’t take it out, and your left very unorganized. It would be great if you could look into these bugs and fix them, since I look forward to using Otter more in the future! I also suggest that you add some more organizing features like being able to underline text, different highlight colors, a way to trim audio-recordings, and more.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read through my review, and I hope you can consider these suggestions and fix the bugs :)

Ok, so I downloaded Otter super quick because I needed a way to transcribe an interview that I did, but I didn’t want to pay. Usually I just listen through and type along, but as this was a feature so the interview was quite a bit longer than normal. Not only can you record in Otter , but you can also upload audio files from other sources. It takes about the time length of the interview itself, and while it doesn’t get every word perfect, you can click through the transcript and it will play the audio file in the background as follows through, highlighting the written part that went with the audio that’s playing. It’s a really helpful feature to check back and make sure the quotes are accurate. Otter saved me so much time, and even without paying you get 10hours of transcriptions per month.

Reorder/Sort by Function — This is my biggest complaint with this app. It would be SO helpful if AFTER you added recordings to a folder, you could reorder them or choose to sort them by anything other than the date you added them in. Right now, you’re stuck with them in the order they are added in, and it’s super frustrating.

Sub folders — Folders are nice, but I have a pro account and my folders are getting too numerous to be easily manageable.

Renaming — Right now, the only way to rename recordings is to individually open them, rename them, and then close them. This process is slow and clunky - particularly because you can only view like 16 characters of the name as you’re typing into the box. If you could rename recordings from the same page you view them from, that would be a lot better. The font would be smaller, and you wouldn’t have to wait for wait for each recording to load in its entirety before renaming it.

Find/Replace Function — There are some words that are specific to particular fields of work that the AI gets consistently wrong, even if you manage to think of all of them and put them in your vocabulary ahead of time. If there were a find/replace option, correcting these errors would be a lot easier than having to control F and fix them all individually.

There are aspects of making this app work, specifically editing text into a finished product, that are frustratingly obscure. It’s not for use by the time-challenged. Take your time to learn it well before you use it while facing a deadline.

The delay waiting for the transcription process is both understandable and mightily annoying. The process’s inability to recognize a question, for example, that should be obvious from the structure of the sentence, and to add a question mark rather than a period, can require a huge amount of editing time. Similarly, this app seems to randomly interpret long pauses, sometimes representing them with periods and other times ignoring them altogether. That’s one of the most frequent items requiring correction.

There is little point in continuing this list unless the this app team is reading it. If you can benefit from an approximate transcript accompanied by disambiguating audio, Otter is a blessing. If you need a verbatim account of what was said, plan to put in substantial time making corrections.

Finally, Otter would be of great benefit if the editing process could take place collaboratively in the cloud, and if it could begin on the part of the file that had already been processed. Perhaps there is already a means of doing this, but it seems it would be very clumsy. Clumsy and collaboration are not comfortable companions.

I normally don’t pay for the “upgraded” version of many apps but this one is 100% worth it! As a previous Administrative Assistant I wish I had Otter; however, in my current role Otter is so helpful in recording meetings and helping my minutes and notes go smoothly. Of course not every transcription is going to be 100% accurate (because technology is not perfect) but that is where the clear and concise sound on Otter comes in to play. I think it records better than any recorder I’ve ever used! The transcription is about 85% accurate depending on who is talking. My minutes and notes go by so much faster with this application. The free version is amazing but I take so many minutes at various minutes I had to buy because... why not??? So download Otter! It’s the best one I’ve found to date!!!

I just used this app for the first time for a *phone meeting* with a client. My client was *on speakerphone* - so I didn’t think there was any chance that it would really work. As such, I kept taking notes and switching between different apps on my iPad.

So when I went back to the program & found out I could already hit keywords (this app picks them out of your text) and jump to that part of the meeting, etc. I was really surprised.

The transcription isn’t perfect, but I was having a phone meeting with my client on speakerphone, so I didn’t expect it to be anywhere near as accurate as it was. Additionally, you’ve got the recording synced up with the notes, so even if the transcription isn’t 100%, you can go back & listen & make an adjustment.

Normally after a meeting, I’m trying to go back through my notes and deciphering my abbreviations to figure out what exactly was said - inevitably losing some of the conversation, spending all the time to try to figure out what actually happened, and time to clarify what my abbreviations meant - but this was SO easy.

I am still learning as I’m going (May update this later ; )) but Thank you!!! This is awesome. You just made this meeting the easiest I can remember in ages. Wow!

I am truly knocked out by the quality of the transcriptions from audio recordings and specifically, it's not just the accuracy it's the way the recording are presented as a transcript with time codes and "word-by-word" follow along. I work as a journalist sometimes to contribute to industry newsletters and record many 20-30 min interviews with quickly scribbled notes, on-the-fly noting the timecode for good quotes so I can go back to the recordings to extract them. Otter just made my job so much easier, from the transcripts I can skip straight to the parts I know contain the good quotes, extract the text, and if needed I can listen to the snippets if occasionally it got the transcription not quite right for highly technical words or rough parts of my original recording.

I’ve used it for formal interviews, papers and work. Allows me to get things done - even in traffic, which can tie me up for hours.
The transcription is quite good and getter better - it seems to keep improving.
Very easy to transfer to written versions - which is a big plus for me.
My only knock is the lack of clear instructions and that the writing on the screens is small and they don’t easily zoom in. Since I can’t be the only one using it while driving, they should bring in some designers of apps people use while driving - make it more user friendly for that environment.
As an aside, wish the highlighting text features were a bit easier to use - works at times but then won’t turn on - can’t figure out how to clear. Used to more standard features in adobe or other readers.

I just spent about 2 hours downloading a plethora of dictation apps and testing the same 10 min voice clip (previously recorded conversation between 3 people). One by one apps got deleted, until I got to this app! I am so impressed with the voice engine - it picked up 98% of the conversation. Of course it comes with some typical recognition errors but they’re easy to fix with the user interface. It’s simple to use but so robust. The functionality of Otter has some awesome features not found on other apps. Exporting comes with many options to suite your needs. My team is going to have a blast using this in our meetings. More time focused on the conversation versus scribing everyone’s ideas. Thank you Team this app!!!

First test at 9 member municipal meeting with iPhone X on the table. Good audio quality even for presenters not at the table. Transcription accuracy is remarkable. Don’t expect it to work perfectly if everyone interrupts each other. Identifying speakers was easy - after initial manual identification this app was able to learn and apply speaker names to a 2.25 hour meeting. The 600 minute allowance for a free account is generous. Transcriptions/recordings can be shared with a link - no signin required. Great web integration & collaboration. I don’t need more than 600 minutes per month, but am going to try premium so I can train the jargon vocabulary our committee uses. This was Otter of the day yesterday. Thanks AppStore, for me it’s Otter of the year!

I had to transcribe a 45 minute conversation for a final project for a class and I am surprised at how well Otter works. I uploaded my file from my google drive, and while the quality of sound was worse than the original file, it wasn’t terrible. I was able to easily pick out words, even when someone stumbled over words, trailed off quietly, or we ended up talking over each other. The best part was that Otter was able to, too! And with crazy good accuracy. There were a few misheard words or phrases, which is why I recommend making sure it’s correct yourself before submitting anything, but overall: SO GLAD I FOUND Otter. It literally saved me HOURS of work!