Transcription isn't perfect, and you'll probably still want to take outline notes with your own action items and any key decisions, because what you get in a transcript is a flood of text including every digression and back-and-forth discussion. Both versions of Otter get some words wrong ('currency' instead of 'concurrency') Otter Assistant correctly recognised 'fuzzing', which the phone app mistook for 'buzzing' and 'placing', but the phone app recognised 'of course' correctly instead of suggesting 'at a cost'. But it didn't always detect the transition from one speaker to another as well the phone app, or catch everything at the beginning or end of what someone said. The Otter Assistant did recognise some voices straight away and that improved quickly as we used it for more transcriptions inside Teams. Image: Mary Branscombe / ZDNetīecause we'd used the iPhone to transcribe previous conversations, speaker attribution was better there at first Otter learns to recognise specific voices and remembers the names you give them, but that will be affected by the microphone and speaker combination on your devices. Otter Assistant for Teams didn't initially recognise speakers as well the iPhone Otter app we'd used for some time the apps also made different mistakes in transcription. But in some cases, the Otter assistant missed a couple of words at the beginning of some sentences that the phone transcript captured. In practice, this mostly produced a more accurate transcription - for example, correctly getting '8 AM' as a time rather than the 'AM AM' we saw in the transcription of the same meeting done with Otter on an iPhone.

Theoretically, recording the audio stream directly should give better quality than using a device speaker and microphone.

That won't always work for conference events hosted in Teams: for example, the Teams-based Q&A sessions at the recent Microsoft Ignite conference were set to open in the web version and not expose the meeting details in the URL (or show in our Teams calendar), so we couldn't even try to invite the Otter Assistant.

Again, you'll have to do it from the Otter dashboard, and you need the URL of the Teams invite link, which includes any meeting password. Unlike the integrated transcription, Otter Assistant isn't restricted to scheduled meetings if you jump into a quick meeting to sort something out, you can still use the assistant.

Otter app for iphone