I’ve lost count of how many AI note-taking apps I’ve installed this year.
Every week, there’s a new one that promises to record, transcribe, and summarize my meetings, and every week, the free tier either collapses after 30 minutes or locks the AI features behind a credit pool that’s used up in days.
After a couple of weeks of using the popular ones on Android instead of just reading their marketing pages, I kept coming back to Otter. It’s not perfect, and I’ll get to where it falls short, but it’s the only free AI note-taker on Android that stands up to serious use.
Here’s what it gets right, and what the rest get wrong.
5 best AI note-taking apps for Google Meet to make each call easier
Supercharge your Google Meet notes
Otter doesn’t gate the AI behind a credit pool
Summaries and chat are on the free tier instead of a demo
The whole point of an AI note-taker is that it does the thinking for me. Transcription is the raw material, but summaries, extracting action items, and the ability to ask questions about a past recording are the final product.
Any tool that gates those behind a credit system is selling me the wrapper, and not the thing itself.
The clearest example of that trap is Fireflies, which includes 20 AI credits per month on its Free plan to use advanced features like AskFred and AI soundbites.
Those credits burn up fast because every summary and every question you ask about a past call eats into the pool. I reached zero by the middle of the second week, and all transcripts after that were just walls of text.
Otter handles this very differently. AI Chat is included in the free plan, along with transcription and summaries in English, French, or Spanish. There’s still a cap on AI chat queries, but the summaries aren’t gated.
The free tier is usable for a week of work
300 minutes a month beats a 3-minute screenshot demo
Every free tier has limits, so what I’m really asking is whether those limits are loose enough to capture the average conversation.
I tried Notta, and it didn’t hit the mark for me. Its free plan caps real-time transcription at three minutes per recording and web meeting transcription at three minutes per session. This is just a screenshot generator, not an actual feature, and I couldn’t capture a single conversation inside that limit.
Otter’s limits are somewhat within the range I can work with. You get 300 transcription minutes per month, with a 30-minute duration cap per transcription.
The per-session cap is inconvenient on longer calls, but most of my conversations, including stand-ups, client check-ins, and quick lectures, are within 30 minutes.
The monthly minutes fit enough of those into a week that I never ran out before the next month came along.
Google Meet’s AI meeting notes are finally available in languages other than English
Lucky number seven
Otter records in-person, not just Zoom calls
A calendar invite shouldn’t be the only way to take notes
A big part of the AI note-taking ecosystem is built around joining Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams as a bot. This is fine for the calendar-based portion of my week, but useless for the rest.
Whenever I have coffee meetings with someone who wants feedback on an idea, or a short catch-up that’s worth remembering, I’m not going to create an online meeting with a bot-joinable link. But many popular AI note-takers can’t see anything their bot can’t join.
Otter records in-person through its Android app. I simply open it, tap Record, and the phone’s mic does all the rest.
The transcript and summary are stored in the same place as any Meet or Teams recording, with speaker ID to label who said what. The transcript was clean enough to extract quotes from afterward.
Wave is another app that does bot-free recording well on Android, probably better than Otter. However, its free plan offers 30 minutes of recording per month, which is ten times tighter than Otter’s limits.
Otter’s Android app earns its place on my home screen
The mobile experience is just as good as on a desktop
AI note-taking is still primarily desktop-first, and many of the free Android apps I tested in this category mostly let you read transcripts. As someone who is constantly in meetings while on the move, that’s a deal-breaker.
Otter’s Android app records on-device, transcribes in real time, and handles speaker ID after you’ve trained it on a few voices.
It runs in the background, so I could keep using my phone while it captured. Plus, the Play Store listing shows active development, with mobile features landing at the same time as desktop ones, rather than months behind.
To its credit, Fireflies has a proper Android app too, but the credit gate from earlier still applies on mobile. So the feature that makes the app useful is the same one that runs out within a couple of weeks.
Where Otter still falls short
The session cap and 3 lifetime imports are gotchas
Otter’s 30-minute per-conversation cap is the biggest limit for practical use.
If I’m trying to capture a 45-minute call, I’ll lose the ending portion unless I stop and restart partway through, which is exactly the kind of friction an AI note-taker is supposed to remove.
The three lifetime file import limit is worse in theory than in practice because it’s specifically for pre-recorded audio files you want to transcribe after the fact.
You can still live-record as much as you want within the monthly minutes, and that’s how most people use it. But if your workflow depends on importing old recordings, you reach limits fast, and there’s no reset.
Neither of those stopped me from using the app. They’re just natural limits on what the free tier can reasonably do before you have to subscribe to a paid plan.
Google Meet’s AI note-taker is going IRL
Transcribe your in-person discussions
The free AI note-taker worth keeping on Android
Every free AI note-taker makes the same deal with its users. You get useful AI features, but only up to a point, and you have to pay once past that point.
The question is whether the free tier gives you enough room to do real work before you reach the ceiling.
Otter gives you that room because it doesn’t gate the AI layer. The session and monthly caps are usable, and mobile is a primary platform rather than a side feature.
That’s a low bar that I wish more AI note-taking apps cleared, but Otter is one app that clears it.
