Is Otter.ai safe for confidential meetings?
Otter.ai is one of the best-known AI meeting assistants: it joins your calls, transcribes them and writes summaries. It's convenient, but if your meetings involve client confidences or patient information, convenience isn't the only question. Here's what Otter's own documents say, and what to check before you use it, or any cloud notetaker, for confidential work.
How Otter works
Otter is a cloud service. Recordings are uploaded, transcribed on Otter's systems and stored in your account, so you can search, share and summarize them. Its privacy policy names Amazon Web Services, based in the United States, as a provider it relies on for computing and data storage. It also lists other vendors that receive personal information, including artificial intelligence service providers and data labeling providers.
Does Otter use recordings to train its AI?
Otter's privacy policy, effective June 16, 2026, lists among its purposes "training our proprietary AI technology on de-identified audio recordings and on transcriptions", and notes that those transcriptions may contain personal information. It gives consent or legitimate interests as the legal basis, and says de-identified data will be kept in de-identified form.
De-identification reduces the risk, but it isn't the same as your recordings never being used. For a lawyer or clinician, the practical question is whether your plan and its settings keep your meetings out of training altogether. Ask Otter, in writing, before you record anything confidential.
The 2025 lawsuit over Otter's notetaker
In August 2025, a proposed class action was filed against Otter in federal court in California. As reported by NPR, the complaint alleges that Otter's notetaker recorded people who weren't Otter users and hadn't agreed to it, and that the recordings were used to train Otter's speech recognition. According to the complaint, the notetaker typically asks the meeting host for permission but not every participant, and can join meetings automatically when the host has connected a calendar. The allegations haven't been proven in court.
What Otter offers for regulated work
In July 2025, Otter announced that it had achieved HIPAA compliance, adding to its existing SOC 2 Type II certification. If you handle patient information in the US, compliance isn't automatic for every account: you'll typically need a business associate agreement (BAA) with the vendor. Check which plan includes one before you record patients.
Questions to ask before recording confidential meetings
- Where are recordings stored, and for how long? Can you set automatic deletion?
- Are recordings or transcripts used to train AI, even de-identified? Can you opt out for your whole workspace?
- Who can access them? Staff, contractors, AI providers, data labelers?
- Does the notetaker join meetings automatically? Turn off auto-join, and make sure it announces itself.
- Has everyone agreed to be recorded? Some US states require the consent of everyone in the conversation.
- Is there a BAA or data processing agreement for your plan, if your work requires one?
Professional rules still apply
For US lawyers, the American Bar Association's Formal Opinion 512 (July 2024) says that before entering information about a client's matter into a generative AI tool that can learn from what it's given, a lawyer generally needs the client's informed consent, and boilerplate in an engagement letter isn't enough. Doctors and therapists have similar duties under health privacy law and their professional codes. Whatever tool you choose, you remain responsible for what happens to the information.
The alternative: keep the audio on your device
For your own dictation, memos and notes after a meeting, on-device transcription avoids most of these questions: the audio never reaches a server, so there's nothing to store, share or train on. See how to transcribe voice notes on iPhone without the cloud and our guide to secure dictation for lawyers.
This guide summarizes publicly available documents as of October 2026. Otter's policies and products change, so check the current versions before you decide. It isn't legal advice.