Otter Voice Notes
Fast, accurate speech transcription
Free (IAPs) From AISense, otter.ai Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 9 or later
Artificial intelligence has seeped into many parts of our lives, from voiceactivated assistants like Siri to predicting our searches before they’re fully typed. One of the more compelling uses for this technology is accurately transcribing speech in near real-time, great for taking notes or capturing meetings.
Otter Voice Notes is a new universal iOS app that does just that. Although free to download, users are limited to 600 minutes each month. Unless your life is spent in the boardroom, that’s quite a lot, but you can upgrade anytime to a whopping 6,000 minutes with the $9.99 monthly or $79.99 annually Premium plan.
When you first launch Otter, the app prompts you to sign up using a Google account or email address, then records a short voiceprint to help the backend AI identify you as a speaker. After that, simply tap the mic icon and start talking — your words magically appear on screen as they’re spoken, giving you a good idea how accurate the resulting transcription will be (pretty darned good, based on our tests.)
Each recording appears under Conversations, where you open, read, play, or share complete transcripts or individual passages. Text can also be edited by tapping and holding the desired block, then tapping the pencil icon to make changes. For some reason, this only works on transcribed text — there’s no way to add in-between text that might have been missed, which is an oversight.
By tapping the avatar next to each text block, you can also tag new or existing speakers. It’s not necessary to do this for an entire conversation — by tagging one or two of the best bits recorded in a noise-free environment, Otter does a good job of matching speakers for the rest.
In addition to creating new conversations on the fly, you can also import audio — even from videos — using the Share sheet. We were pleasantly surprised how quickly and accurately Otter transcribed narration from a movie trailer imported using the Files app, even with music and background sound effects. After a few quick edits, the text was ready to export to a file, complete with the option to include or remove speaker names and timestamps.
the bottom line. Surprisingly accurate mobile transcription.