Fluent vs Otter. One joins the call.
Otter is a capable notetaker for scheduled video calls. To get the audio, it sends a bot into your Zoom, Meet, or Teams meeting — a participant everyone in the room can see.
Fluent captures the room instead of the call. No bot. Nothing in the participant list.
How each one gets the audio
Otter
- Sends Otter Notetaker to join the call as a participant.
- Works on Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams.
- Visible in the participant list; records the call stream.
- Audio routes through Otter's servers.
- No bot to join means no notes — in-person meetings aren't covered.
Fluent
- Captures the room through a pendant or your phone's mic.
- Never joins the call; never appears in the participant list.
- Works in person, on walks, at lunch, in the hallway.
- Audio lives in your own account, encrypted at rest, never used to train models.
- Summary, action items by speaker, attributed transcript, cross-meeting patterns.
If your week is back-to-back remote video calls, a bot-joiner fits. If the conversations that matter happen across a table, on a walk, or after the call ends, the bot can't follow you there.
The meetings a bot can't join
Otter follows a calendar invite. It can't follow you into an in-person 1:1, a walking meeting with a coaching client, lunch with a customer, an investor pitch in their office, or the hallway conversation where the most useful sentence of the week gets said.
Fluent captures all of it, because it listens to the room rather than the call. Phone capture is rolling out now, so you don't need a pendant to start.
The honest boundary: Fluent will not join your Zoom call to record the far-side stream. That's the bot's job, and the bot is the thing we deliberately don't build. For a remote call, Fluent captures the audio in your room. See how AI meeting notes work without a bot.
Notes the meeting didn't notice.
No bot in the room. No vendor in the participant list. The notes are waiting when the meeting ends.
See how Fluent does meeting notes