Meeting Assistants & Transcription
Otter.ai
High riskAI meeting assistant that joins calls to record, transcribe, and summarize conversations, with automatic sharing features.
Is Otter.ai safe for confidential data?
Otter records entire conversations — including whatever clients, patients, or counterparties say — and has used audio recordings and transcripts to train its models per its published privacy policy. Auto-join and auto-share defaults mean meetings are often recorded without every participant's informed consent, which raises two-party-consent and confidentiality issues before any data-handling question. For regulated professions, an unmanaged Otter bot in a client call is one of the highest-exposure shadow-AI patterns.
Risk by plan
The same product often carries very different terms depending on the tier — consumer plans are where the exposure concentrates.
Personal accounts; auto-join calendar integration; training use per privacy policy; no org visibility.
Workspace admin controls and centralized ownership; training restrictions negotiable.
SSO, compliance controls, custom terms; HIPAA BAA available on this tier since July 2025; confirm training exclusion and retention in the order form.
Data handling
Training on inputs
Otter's privacy policy permits use of de-identified audio and transcripts to train and improve its models; enterprise arrangements can restrict this.
Retention
Recordings and transcripts are retained in the user's account until deleted; sharing links and workspace sync can propagate copies beyond the original owner.
Residency
Hosted in U.S. cloud infrastructure; no customer-selectable residency on standard plans.
Compliance
- SOC 2Yes
- GDPR / DPAConditional
- HIPAA BAAConditional
Certifications typically apply to specific tiers and contracts — confirm scope in writing before relying on them.
New to these frameworks? See our plain-language guides to SOC 2 and the other AI compliance standards.
Enterprise controls
- Workspace admin console (Business/Enterprise)
- SSO (Enterprise)
- Centralized recording ownership
- Sharing restrictions
Frequently asked questions
Does Otter.ai train on my recordings?
Its privacy policy permits training on de-identified audio and transcripts. Enterprise customers can negotiate restrictions, but individual accounts — the ones that auto-join your client calls — are covered by the standard policy.
Is it legal for an employee's Otter bot to record client calls?
It depends on consent law in each participant's jurisdiction and on your professional obligations. Recording a privileged or confidential call through a third-party AI service without informed consent can breach both. This is a policy question to settle before the data-handling one.
How do we find out who is using Otter?
Look for the bot in meeting participant lists, calendar-integration grants, and network logs — or use Sanitized AI's shadow-AI discovery to inventory AI destinations, including meeting bots, across the organization.
Policy changelog
- Initial entry published from Otter.ai's published policies.
Sources
This profile summarizes the vendor's published policies as of the verification date. It is not legal advice.
Otter.ai is probably already in your organization.
Sanitized AI shows you who is using it and redacts sensitive data from prompts before it leaves your control.
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