Otter alternativeAn Otter alternative without the bot in the room

Otter and Hushscript answer different questions. Otter asks: what if an assistant attended every meeting? Hushscript asks: what happens to the recording you already have, and who else gets anything from it? If the second question is the one you’re asking, this page is the comparison.

What Otter does well

Honesty first. Otter is a capable live meeting assistant: its agent joins Zoom, Teams, and Meet calls and transcribes in real time, summaries and action items flow out automatically, a chat interface answers questions across your meeting history, and integrations reach Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and more. For a team that wants an always-on meeting layer with live captions, that is a real product, and Hushscript doesn’t imitate it.

Where the models part ways

Three structural differences, all verifiable from Otter’s own published pages as of the date below.

	Otter	Hushscript
Joins the call	An agent joins Zoom, Teams and Meet meetings	Nothing joins; you upload the recording afterward
Live captions	Yes	No
Pricing shape	Per seat, per month	Prepaid packs, $1.99 to $49.99, no seats
Minutes	Monthly allowance below the top tiers	Bought once, valid a year, any activity resets the window
Length of one recording	Per-conversation cap on every plan	10 hours per file
File imports	3 for the lifetime of a free account	No import quota on any account
Training on your content	Privacy policy lists training on de-identified recordings and transcriptions	Never used to train models
The audio afterward	Kept with the account	Deleted the moment the transcript is ready

The bot. Otter’s homepage offers to “automatically join all your Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet meetings” – an agent in the participant list. Hushscript never joins anything: you record with your platform’s own tools and upload the file afterward, so nothing about your meetings changes and nobody’s client sees an extra attendee.

The training. Otter’s privacy policy lists, among its uses of personal information, “training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions (which may contain Personal Information)”. Hushscript’s position is structural: recordings are never used to train models, and the transcription audio is deleted the moment the transcript is ready. Stored transcripts are encrypted at rest, under retention rules you set, with private mode available when no saved transcript should exist at all.

The meter. Otter prices per seat per month, with minute allowances below the top tiers, per-conversation duration caps on every plan, and – on the free plan – 3 file imports for the lifetime of the account. Hushscript has no seats and no month: prepaid packs from $1.99, about $0.50 per hour on the largest, minutes valid for a year with any activity resetting the window, and no monthly or lifetime import quota.

What an Otter alternative gives you instead

Losing the bot is not the whole trade. The four things Hushscript charges you for, or deliberately doesn’t, are these.

Price you can see in advance. Five prepaid packs, $1.99 for 45 minutes up to $49.99 for 100 hours: about $2.65 an hour at the smallest, about $0.67 at $19.99 for 30 hours, $0.50 at the largest. No seat count multiplies it, and minutes stay valid for a year with any transcription or purchase resetting the window.

Privacy as architecture, not a plan tier. The transcription audio is deleted the moment the transcript is ready. What remains is encrypted at rest under a retention window you choose (keep until you delete, or auto-delete after 7, 30, 90, or 365 days), private mode returns a password-protected archive and saves no transcript at all, EU, EEA, Swiss, and UK audio is processed in the EU, and nothing is ever used to train a model.

Vocabulary you control. Saved dictionaries hold the client names, product names, and acronyms your meetings are full of, bulk-imported from a CSV or TSV and marked default so they apply on every upload; one-off keyterms and a one-off prompt cover a single call. All of it steers recognition before the transcript exists.

The pass that usually costs extra. One free Insights run per transcript, all-in: summaries, action items, decisions, open questions, quotes with transcript evidence, chapters, speaker topics, and a fully rewritten Cleaned transcript in its own tab beside the Original. Regenerating it later draws minutes from your balance, and the cost is shown before you confirm.

What switching looks like

There’s nothing to migrate and nothing to cancel first: export what you need from Otter, and start uploading recordings to Hushscript whenever a file matters. Both can coexist – some teams keep a live assistant for routine standups and use Hushscript for the recordings that are sensitive, long, or in one of the ~99 languages, with translation targets when a transcript needs to be read in another language. Your first free Insights run adds summaries, action items, and decisions with transcript evidence, so the after-meeting artifacts you’d expect still arrive, just from an upload instead of a bot.