

Unlike other industries, it isn’t battling rampant wage inflation. Here’s the maddening thing: Otter.ai is an automated service. If an interview crosses over the 90 minute threshold, they’ll have to split the file into separate parts, each using up one of their scarce upload slots.Ĭustomer service tweets are not really my ~style, but I simply must speak out about the new pricing structure of impossible to understand, much more expensive, while limiting to 1x speed playback and 10 imports per month renders it pretty much useless! Gahhh- Elle Hunt September 15, 2022 Users will have to budget against an arbitrary upload limit. The planned changes to Otter.ai are inherently inflexible. One investigation I wrote for Wired involved dozens of sources (even if they weren’t all named). If I’m working on a large feature-length piece, I’ll speak to potentially dozens of people. Some will be short and brisk, while others will take place over an hours-long dinner meeting. If I attend a trade show, I’ll conduct countless interviews. You need to identify the salient parts of a story and distill them into a clear, quotable message.īut I also like having a cushion. That’s why it’s important to keep interviews focused. Journalists translate difficult concepts into digestible articles. I make a point of keeping interviews to a brisk 30 minutes. Otter.ai has undeniably worsened its service, but I likely won’t be impacted. Here’s the thing: I seldom ever came close to using my full allotment of transcription minutes. Pro users could previously synchronize their recordings and transcriptions to Dropbox. The company has halved the number of words you can have in your custom vocabulary, from 400 (which includes 200 names and 200 custom terms) to 200 (100 a piece). Put simply, Otter.ai plans to charge users more for an objectively worse service. Oh, and you can only upload ten files per month. The maximum recording length is 90 minutes. Otter.ai has slashed the amount of minutes to 1,200. In return, you could transcribe up to 6,000 minutes of recordings.Īudio files could be as long as four hours, and you could transcribe as many pieces as you want, so long as you remained within your minute allowance.įrom September, this will change.

Until now, Otter.ai’s pricing was simple.
