Otter.ai's Business plan costs $239.88 a year, about £190. That's for a feature Microsoft already gives away free in every paid Teams licence: a live transcript (otter.ai pricing, verified July 2026). Whether that's money well spent depends entirely on what your organisation already pays for, and most dyslexic employees never check before reaching for their own card.
What Teams already gives you for free
Microsoft Teams has included automatic meeting transcription in every paid tier since 2023. Any meeting organiser can switch it on from the "More actions" menu, and it runs in the background without anyone touching a recorder.
The output lands in two places: live captions during the call, and a full transcript saved afterwards. It appears in the meeting's Recap tab (Microsoft Teams accessibility documentation, verified July 2026). It costs nothing extra: no new licence, no per-user charge, no trial that quietly expires.
The catch is what you actually get. It's a flat, unstructured wall of text: who said what, in order, with timestamps. There's no summary, no auto-generated action items, and no way to search across several meetings at once unless your organisation also pays for Teams Premium or Copilot.
If you only need a record to check what was agreed, or to prove you were told something, free Teams transcription probably already covers it. Ask IT to confirm it's switched on before you spend anything.
Where the free version breaks down for dyslexia
A 45-minute meeting produces roughly 6,000 words of raw transcript. Scrolling through that to find the two sentences where your name came up is exactly the kind of re-reading task dyslexia makes slower and more tiring.
Working memory, not reading speed, is the real barrier here. If you can't reliably hold what was said in a meeting long enough to act on it later, a wall of undifferentiated text doesn't fix that. It just moves the problem from live listening to solo scrolling afterwards.
Re-reading a full transcript to extract three action items, then rewriting them into your own task list, is unpaid admin time that stacks up meeting after meeting. The masking cost calculator puts a number on what that adds up to across a year. Enter your salary and the workarounds you already use, and it converts the hours into pounds.
If re-reading transcripts after every meeting is already part of your week, that's a cost worth measuring, not just tolerating.
What Otter.ai adds, and what it actually costs
Otter.ai has three paid tiers, priced in US dollars (otter.ai pricing, verified July 2026):
| Plan | Price | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | 300 transcription minutes a month, live captions |
| Pro | $16.99/mo, or $8.33/mo billed annually ($99.96/yr, about £79) | AI summaries, up to 90 minutes a meeting, 1,200 minutes a month |
| Business | $30/mo, or $19.99/mo billed annually ($239.88/yr, about £190) | Unlimited meetings, up to 4 hours a meeting, custom AI workflows, admin controls |
All three tiers join Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams automatically, and produce a searchable summary with auto-extracted action items after every call.
That cross-platform reach is Otter's real advantage over Teams' built-in transcription. If your meetings happen across three different video tools depending on which client or department you're dealing with, Teams' free transcription only covers the Teams ones.
Pay for Otter because you need one transcript system that follows you across every meeting platform, not because Teams' free version is broken.
Three Otter settings worth changing on day one
Custom vocabulary matters most: add your team's project names, product acronyms, and colleagues' names before your first real meeting. The Business plan supports 800 shared team terms plus 200 personal terms (otter.ai pricing, verified July 2026). Skip this step and the transcript mangles exactly the words you need most.
Connect your calendar so Otter joins Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet automatically. Otherwise you have to remember to invite it to every call yourself, which defeats the point for anyone relying on it as a memory backstop.
Slow playback down to 0.75x when reviewing action items rather than replaying at full speed. It catches details a normal-speed re-listen misses, which matters when the barrier is working memory rather than hearing.
Otter is weaker in loud rooms or when several people talk over each other, and it can't retroactively transcribe a meeting you forgot to record. A human note-taker can be asked for a recap after the fact; Otter cannot.
Set custom vocabulary and calendar sync up before your first tracked meeting, not after a transcript comes back full of misheard names.
What Microsoft 365 Copilot adds instead
Your employer might already pay for Teams Premium (£7.70 a user a month, UK, billed yearly, ex-VAT) or Microsoft 365 Copilot (£16.10 a user a month, UK, verified July 2026). If so, you may already have most of what Otter sells you, built into the tool you're using anyway (Microsoft Teams Premium and Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing pages, verified July 2026).
Teams Premium adds Intelligent Recap: AI-generated meeting notes, key moments flagged automatically, and auto-generated tasks, inside the same Recap tab as the free transcript.
Microsoft 365 Copilot goes further, carrying the same AI notetaking into Outlook, Word, and the rest of Microsoft 365, not just Teams meetings. Neither is something you can switch on yourself; both are licences your IT or finance team buys at an organisation level.
Before you pay for Otter with your own money, ask IT whether Teams Premium or Copilot is already licensed somewhere in your organisation. You might just need it turned on for your account.
Getting Access to Work to pay for it
Access to Work funding is tool-agnostic. It pays for whatever a caseworker agrees addresses your specific difficulty, not a fixed list of approved software (DWP Access to Work guidance, verified July 2026).
There's no published rule naming Otter.ai specifically, and no confirmation it's pre-approved either. The same was true of ChatGPT and Copilot before dyslexic employees started naming them directly in applications and getting them funded.
Describe the actual problem in your application. You can't reliably retain verbal information from meetings long enough to act on it. You need software that turns spoken meetings into structured, searchable notes.
Name the specific tool, Otter.ai Business or Microsoft 365 Copilot, rather than a vague category like "note-taking help." The Access to Work calculator estimates what your award might look like before you apply. The Access to Work guide covers how to structure the application itself.
Access to Work applications now take 109 days on average to process, against a 25-day target (National Audit Office, February 2026). If you can start with Otter's free Basic plan, or ask IT about an existing Copilot licence today, you get some relief immediately instead of waiting months for a funding decision.
Ask by name, not by category. Naming the exact tool and the exact difficulty it solves is what gets specific software approved.
Which one to actually buy
Three situations cover most dyslexic employees weighing this up.
If your meetings stay inside Teams and your employer already licenses Copilot or Teams Premium, don't buy anything yet. Ask IT to enable Intelligent Recap for your account first.
If your meetings stay inside Teams and there's no Copilot or Premium licence anywhere in your organisation, Otter Pro is the cheaper option. Its annual plan costs $8.33 a month, about £79 a year, and gets you AI summaries without waiting on IT.
If your meetings are split across Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet because you deal with different clients or departments, Otter Business is the one that solves the problem. It isn't tied to Microsoft's ecosystem.
The evidence points one way: check what your employer already pays for before you reach for your own card. Most of the value here is a licensing question, not a missing piece of technology.
If asking IT to switch on a feature feels like starting from nothing, the reasonable adjustments builder can help. It turns this into a short conversation plan and a draft email in about two minutes.
Start with the free question to your IT team. Only spend your own money once you know it isn't already sitting unused in your organisation's licence.