Best Otter AI Alternative (2025): Fellow AI Meeting Assistant Review
Are you still using Otter.ai for meeting notes… but starting to wonder if it’s really the safest or most robust option out there?
You’re not alone.
Searches like “Otter.ai security breach” and “Is Otter safe?” have been climbing—and honestly, they’re fair questions.
Because if you’re handling sensitive client work, team conversations, or anything high-stakes, your meeting assistant needs to be smarter, safer, and more helpful than just a basic transcription bot.
That’s why today, I want to show you what I believe is the best Otter alternative on the market right now—and the one I personally use in my business: Fellow.
Either keep reading or watch the video below:
Between client sessions, team check-ins, content planning, and admin chats, I live in meetings. But here's the thing: meetings only matter if something comes from them. Clear takeaways. Aligned next steps. Easy follow-ups.
I tried Otter like so many of you probably have, but I needed something more. I didn’t just want a transcript—I wanted structure, security, and actual help managing the full meeting process.
That’s when I found Fellow. And once I tried it, I never looked back.
Today, I’m breaking down why it’s the best alternative to Otter.ai and walking you through what it can actually do for your business.
Fellow = More Than Just Transcripts
Let’s start with the basics.
Fellow is an AI-powered meeting assistant. Yes, it transcribes your meetings—but it also helps you plan them, run them, and follow up on them.
If you’re like me and you’re juggling multiple roles—CEO, client manager, team lead, content creator—you don’t need more tools. You need a smarter tool. One that brings everything together.
Here’s what makes Fellow stand out:
Security + Privacy
Let’s talk about something that doesn’t always get the spotlight—but absolutely should: security and privacy.
We’re in a time where meetings are filled with sensitive information. Think about it—coaching calls, client strategies, financials, even internal team dynamics.
If you're like me, you want to know your conversations are protected, especially if you're dealing with confidential information every single day.
Fellow is built with real business users in mind.
It’s SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, and offers HIPAA compliance too. That means it’s suitable for industries where privacy isn’t just important—it’s legally and ethically non-negotiable. We’re talking healthcare, legal, finance, therapy, coaching, and more.
That means you don’t have to worry that your conversations are floating around out there, being used to secretly train AI. That’s a real issue with some platforms right now.
In fact, Fellow has special arrangements in place with their AI providers—so that your meeting data is deleted immediately after processing and not retained for training.
And that gives me peace of mind—especially when I’m working on client systems, sharing screen recordings, or discussing revenue numbers. That trust? It’s essential.
Contrast that with Otter:
Otter’s privacy policy, on the other hand, has raised some questions in the past about data usage (for instance, Otter had a controversy about automatically joining and recording meetings which caught some users off guard).
And if you’re like me—someone who works from a place of trust and transparency with clients—that kind of stuff is a hard no.
Pre-Meeting Briefs + Agendas
Okay, let’s talk prep. Because if you’ve ever shown up to a call trying to remember what you were supposed to discuss — you’re not alone.
This might be one of my favorite things.
Fellow doesn’t just help you during the meeting—it sets you up before the meeting ever starts.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: half the chaos in meetings comes from people not being prepared. No agenda, no context, no idea who’s doing what. Just vibes. 🙃
But with Fellow, that prep work is built into the process.
You can create collaborative agendas, reuse templates, and let the AI pull in notes or context from past meetings to build a smart pre-meeting brief.
Imagine starting a call and already having the last conversation’s takeaways summarized, with a checklist of what needs to be addressed today.
That’s what Fellow does.
And when I say that’s a game changer, I mean it. You can hop into a client meeting already knowing:
What you covered last time
What decisions you made
And what you still need to sort out
And honestly, that’s going to save you so much mental load—especially on days where you might be jumping from one call to the next.
No digging through Google Docs. No scrambling to remember what you talked about last time.
Just click into the meeting, and boom—it’s all right there.
During-Meeting Controls
So, let’s talk about what happens during the meeting.
A lot of people think transcription tools are all the same once the meeting starts. But no—this is where Fellow sets itself apart.
First, the AI note-taker kicks in, organizing the conversation into key topics, pulling out action items, and tying everything back to your agenda.
It’s not just recording—it’s also tracking what matters.
You can even pause the recording with one click if something sensitive comes up.
So if your client wants to discuss something personal or off the record, it's easy to make sure that doesn't stay in the recording, but then you can quickly resume right after.
Otter doesn’t give you this kind of control.
Otter offers a basic transcript with highlights but lacks the powerful integrations Fellow offers. It also doesn’t let you easily search or ask questions across multiple meetings.
Otter.ai also doesn't offer video recording capabilities. It specializes in transcribing audio and video content into text. While it can transcribe videos that are played aloud or uploaded, it cannot record video content itself.
Post-Meeting Superpowers
Okay, so your meeting ends…
…and now the real work begins, right?
That’s the part that most transcription tools kind of ignore. They hand you a transcript and go, “Good luck!”
But Fellow is different—because it doesn’t stop at note-taking. It actually helps you follow through.
Fellow automatically generates clean, organized summaries of the meeting.
Not just walls of text—actual decisions, takeaways, and next steps. Bullet points. Action items. Clear sections.
And my favourite part? I integrates with Asana and other task management tools and actually adds the action items for you! Automatically!
So instead of writing out notes or copying action items into another tool, it’s already done.
It also integrates with CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot.
That means the notes from your last sales call? They're in your CRM already. You don’t have to backtrack and manually update it later.
And for someone like me, who manages clients, internal ops, and digital products all in one central Asana hub? It's super useful!
Now I don’t have to retype notes, reassign tasks, or guess who’s doing what.
It’s already in the system, ready to go.
Ask Fellow = Your AI Chief of Staff
Okay, this is where things get even more awesome.
I love the productivity stuff, I love the integrations but this next one is a really powerful feature.
Fellow has a built-in AI assistant called “Ask Fellow” that lets you search your meeting history conversationally.
So instead of scrolling through old transcripts, or trying to remember which meeting something was said in… you can literally just ask the AI.
Need a recap from last month’s strategy call? Just ask.
Want to know if your team has been aligned on project timelines recently? Ask Fellow.
It’s like ChatGPT—but based on your meetings, your notes, and your business context.
Instant Meeting Insights:
During or after a meeting, you can ask Fellow about any detail from the conversation, lie what key decisions were made, and Ask Fellow can quickly pull out relevant details and give you a concise summary, helping you stay on top of your priorities.
You can even ask it to analyze sentiment—like, “How did my last three coaching calls go? Were people upbeat or frustrated?” and get a clear overview of how the your clients have been feeling over time.
Especially if you’re managing clients, a team, or a group program. You get to feel the pulse of how things are going without relying on just your memory or gut instinct.
And honestly, it’s like having a second brain—
One that remembers every meeting, every action, and every little detail you might forgot.
And the beauty of Ask Fellow is that it can dig deeper into your meeting history. You can ask it to compare topics, track progress, or highlight key trends over a series of meetings.
If you want to know whether your team has been consistently aligned on a specific objective, you can Ask Fellow and it will provide the insights based on the conversations you’ve had.
Whether it’s real-time summaries or long-term trends, Ask Fellow transforms your meeting data into a powerful tool for driving productivity and staying aligned with your team’s goals. With just a few questions, you can gain insights that would otherwise take hours to uncover.
International Teams? No Problem
If you’re operating internationally, like many of us are in the online business space—then this next feature is going to help a lot too.
Fellow supports transcription in 99 languages.
Compare that to Otter, which supports just 3.
So if you’re working with clients, contractors, or team members across **Europe, Asia, and beyond**you don’t have to default everything to English.
Fellow’s multilingual support means that everyone can participate in the meeting in their native language—and still have access to summaries and notes that make sense across the team.
That’s a huge win if you care about inclusivity, collaboration, and clear communication.
Because here’s the thing: just because someone’s working in a second or third language doesn’t mean they should miss out on action items or feel out of the loop. Fellow helps close that gap and ensures that language isn't a barrier to having secure, AI-generated meeting notes for everyone.
Now honestly, Otter is a solid tool for what it is. It does transcription well. It’s easy to use. But it’s limited.
Fellow is not just an Otter alternative; it’s an upgrade. It combines Otter’s transcription capabilities with powerful extras: agenda templates, intelligent AI assistance, enterprise security, and compliance.
This makes Fellow the go-to choice for organizations that want to harness AI in meetings without compromising on preparation, privacy, or productivity.
For business owners who have back-to-back calls and need outcomes from each one, Fellow acts like a true teammate – ensuring every meeting is well-run, every decision is noted, and every follow-up happens.
It’s the modern way to run meetings, and it’s why Fellow is the best choice for those considering a switch from Otter.
If you’re ready to try a smarter, safer, more supportive meeting assistant—definitely check out Fellow.
You can save 10% using my affiliate link by clicking here!
Whether you're a solopreneur, a coach with a growing team, or just tired of meetings that lead to nowhere—Fellow will help you finally close the loop on every conversation.
