For General Administrative Assistants ·
What you'll accomplish
By the end of this guide, you'll have Otter.ai set up to automatically transcribe any meeting — Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, or in-person — and generate an AI summary and action items that you can turn into official meeting notes in about 10 minutes instead of 45.
What you'll need
Go to otter.ai → click "Sign up for free" → use your work email or Google account. Your free account includes 300 transcription minutes per month, which resets monthly.
What you should see: Your Otter.ai dashboard — a clean page with "Import" and "Record" buttons at the top.
Troubleshooting: If your work email domain is blocked from external tools, use a personal Gmail account instead. Transcripts are private to your account.
In the Otter dashboard: click the profile icon (top right) → Settings → Calendar → Connect to Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar → Authorize. Otter will now appear as a meeting participant option in your calendar events.
What you should see: Your upcoming meetings appear in the Otter "Upcoming" section with a toggle to "Add Otter to meeting."
In Settings → OtterPilot → toggle "Automatically join my Zoom/Teams/Google Meet meetings." When enabled, OtterPilot appears as a participant called "Otter.ai" that joins your meetings and transcribes them automatically.
What you should see: OtterPilot now joins your scheduled meetings automatically — no action required from you during the meeting.
Troubleshooting: Some organizations block unrecognized participants from joining. If OtterPilot is removed from meetings, use the manual recording method in Step 4 instead.
Option A (phone): Open the Otter app on your phone → tap the large red microphone button → place your phone on the table with the speaker facing the room → Otter transcribes in real time.
Option B (laptop): In the Otter web app, click "Record" → select "Record computer audio" to capture Zoom/Teams audio directly through your computer without a separate app joining.
What you should see: A live transcript appearing on screen as people speak, with speaker names labeled (Otter auto-learns who's who over time).
After the meeting ends (or when you stop recording), open the conversation in Otter → click "Summary" at the top of the transcript → Otter AI generates bullet points for topics discussed, key decisions, and action items.
Click "Export" → choose "Email" to send the summary to yourself, or "Copy" to paste into a Word document or email.
What you should see: A structured summary with 3-7 bullet points, followed by a list of detected action items with speaker attribution.
Open a new Word document (or email) → paste the Otter summary → add your standard header (Meeting Name, Date, Attendees) → edit the action items to add deadlines and correct any names Otter misidentified → send to attendees.
Total time from meeting end to notes distributed: 10-15 minutes.
After Otter generates the transcript, you can ask Otter AI follow-up questions in the chat: