Otter.ai vs tl;dv

These two are the clearest illustration in this directory that privacy in a note-taker is not about encryption. Both encrypt. They differ on what the company does with what it hears.

Training data, and who opted you in

Otter.ai uses de-identified customer recordings to train its own models. You are opted into that by using the product.

tl;dv states that no customer data is used to train the models, and lets you choose EU or US hosting for the AI processing. tl;dv scores 5 for privacy against Otter.ai's 2 — the widest gap between any two products in this wave, and it comes down to those two facts.

For a freelancer transcribing their own notes this may not matter. For anyone recording a client, a patient or a candidate, it decides the page.

A trash bin against a deletion date

Otter.ai's retention is a thirty-day trash bin rather than a policy an administrator can set. There is nothing to configure — deleted things sit there for thirty days, and that is the whole model.

tl;dv deletes free-plan recordings after three months, which is a harder limit but a stated one, and search across the whole archive is held back to a paid tier. Neither offers per-user retention controls the way Read AI does.

Coverage goes the other way, though not far. tl;dv is advertised as thirty-plus languages but publishes no enumerated list, which is why it is absent from this directory's language filters — a count is not a list. Otter.ai publishes its six. tl;dv scores 3 for coverage against Otter.ai's 2.

On the notes themselves Otter.ai scores 4 for output depth against tl;dv's 3, and has live transcription, speaker identification and cross-meeting chat on its free plan. tl;dv scores 4 for workflow fit against Otter.ai's 3 and is built around clipping moments out of a call.

Which should you choose?

Choose tl;dv if the recordings are of other people and you would rather they did not become training data, or if European processing is something you have to be able to point at.

Choose Otter.ai if speaker identification and live transcription matter most, your meetings are in English, and you have read the training policy and are comfortable with it.