App review: Otter.ai

Otter.ai is a speech-to-text app which can also be run on a computer. It records and transcribes conversations in real-time. Otter was designed for automatic note-taking, but can also be used to generate live captions.

Available on iOS and Android via www.otter.ai

Ages: 11 to 25

Review

Lexxi-Pearl

Reviewed by Lexxi-Pearl (12) who is moderately deaf and wears hearing aids.

"Otter was easy to set up as it gives step-by-step instructions. It asked me to say something to set up my voice on the app, so that it could recognise me. I found it worked better when the speech it was transcribing was playing out loud, rather than through headphones. The subtitles were very clear and accurate, but when my dog JuJu decided to bark, it wasn’t so good to use without headphones!

After trying it for live conversation, my mum uploaded a Facebook video on my iPad and I used the transcription part to understand the video. It was good quality and I’d use it again to transcribe videos.

We were able to sync between my iPad and iPhone, which I really liked because then it doesn't use too much storage."