What is Otter.ai?
Otter.ai is a popular app for transcribing meetings. It works for both virtual video conferencing meetings as well as in-person meetings. For virtual meetings, Otter sends a bot to join the user’s meeting to record and transcribe. For in-person meetings, Otter has a mobile app that can record the conversation.
If you’re looking to access meeting transcription to use in your own app, you might have considered integrating with Otter, especially if it’s a tool your users already use.
Does Otter have an API?
Unfortunately, Otter does not have an official API, nor does it integrate with automation tools like Zapier. The lack of an API has been a major pain point for developers who want to incorporate Otter's functionality into their own apps. However, there are few alternative options to access meeting transcription and recording.
Ways to get meeting transcription and recordings
1. Unofficial Otter APIs
Because of the lack of official Otter APIs, developers have taken it upon themselves to create unofficial versions. There are a few open source, unofficial APIs people have made for Otter, such as https://github.com/gmchad/otterai-api and https://github.com/omerdn1/otter.ai-api. The benefit of this option is that it gives you a way to integrate with Otter. The downside is that these open source libraries aren’t consistently maintained, so they wouldn’t be suitable if you need production grade reliability.
2. Manually export data from Otter
3. Integrate with the meeting platforms directly
If some of your users don’t use Otter, or if you don’t want your users to be tied to Otter as a prerequisite to use your product, you could integrate with the video conferencing platforms directly. This would let you get the recording and transcription straight from the source.
When considering this route, you should start off by integrating with the most popular video conferencing platforms, namely Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams and Webex. The only downside is these integrations typically take at least 4 months, especially for some platforms which require you to build a bot to join the call, the way Otter does.
If you want a quick way to integrate with all the meeting platforms, consider using Recall.ai, which is a unified API that lets you integrate with all the meeting platforms at once. With Recall.ai, you could quickly build recording and transcribing functionality into your app, bypassing the need for your users to use a separate recording tool like Otter.
Summary
In summary, Otter.ai does not have an official API. However there are other options such as using fan-made, unofficial Otter APIs, asking your users to manually export data from Otter, or integrating with the video conferencing platforms directly instead.