ChatGPT Drafts My Meeting Notes. Otter Records Them. The Overlap Hurt.

ChatGPT's meeting summaries are good when I paste a transcript, but I was the one transcribing, which defeated the purpose. Otter records and transcribes automatically, but its summaries are thinner and sometimes miss the decision buried in small talk.

The waste was paying two subscriptions to cover one workflow. I'd record in Otter, copy the text to ChatGPT, ask for action items, then paste them somewhere. Three tools, two tabs, one task that should be one product.

What fixed it: Otter became the recorder and I let its native summary improve, while ChatGPT only handles the occasional 'turn this into a polite follow-up email' on top of Otter's output. I stopped pasting raw audio into ChatGPT entirely; it never transcribed as cleanly as Otter anyway.

Verdict: Otter for capture, ChatGPT for polish. If you're doing both inside ChatGPT Plus, you're paying to do Otter's job worse. Let the recorder record.