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If you search for "best transcription software," you will inevitably land on Otter.ai. It is a ubiquitous tool, beloved by students, corporate managers, and anyone who feels like they live in Zoom meetings.
But for a newsroom or a sports production team, "popular" doesn't always mean "right."
While both Trint and Otter transform speech to text with impressive accuracy, it’s worth noting that each solution is built for completely different audiences. While Otter.ai serves an “attendee” - that is, someone who needs to remember what happened in a meeting, Trint serves the “storyteller”; someone who needs to make sense of what they’ve just heard and share it with the world.
If you’re wondering which solution might work best for your media team or newsroom, read on to see how the two platforms compare when the deadline is approaching.
The fundamental difference lies in what these tools think you are doing.
Otter.ai is the ultimate "AI note taker" across four languages (English, French, Spanish, and Japanese). It lives inside your calendar, automatically joins your Google Meet and Zoom calls, and generates summaries with action items. If your day consists of corporate strategy calls and internal catch-ups, Otter is unbeatable.
Meanwhile Trint assumes you’re handling content, not meetings - and in more than 50 languages. As well as being founded and built by journalists, it integrates with news production systems, MAMs and live video-broadcasting tools to streamline newsroom workflows and meet journalists where they work. Trint customers such as BILD have successfully connected Trint to a wider tech stack to automate workflows and work even faster.
In sum, Trint isn't just trying to summarize your editorial meeting; it’s ingesting the raw footage from the press conference so your team can start cutting and - importantly - sharing the story before anyone else.
Verdict: If you want to know what your boss said in the morning briefing, use Otter. If you want to take a soundbite from a post-game interview and have it ready at lightning speed for the next bulletin, then use Trint.
For journalists, protecting a source is sacred. For enterprise media, data compliance is law.
While Otter.ai is SOC 2 Type II certified, their standard terms allow them to use de-identified audio recordings to train their AI models. While this helps them improve the accuracy of their engine (and they do offer opt-outs for Enterprise plans), the idea that your interview could potentially be accessed for training a machine is too much of a data privacy red flag and a risk that many investigative units simply cannot take. In addition, data is stored only in the US.
Trint draws a hard line here. Put simply, no one sees your data but you. Trint is ISO 27001 certified while our AI is trained on external data sets. In addition, you have a choice of storing data either in the EU or US, meaning European newsrooms can ensure their data never leaves the EU - a critical requirement for GDPR compliance that many US-centric tools overlook. Hence why newsrooms like Politico chose Trint when dealing with confidential and high-level sources.
Verdict: Otter is secure enough for general business. But for sensitive journalism or protected sources, Trint’s "no-training" policy and data sovereignty options offer the necessary peace of mind.
Unlike many other transcription solutions out there, both Trint and Otter.ai offer "live" transcription. But it’s worth noting that each offers a different experience.
Otter.ai’s live feature is more personal. That is, it transcribes the conversation on each meeting participant’s device so they can read along.
Trint’s live transcription is built specifically for the fast paced, collaborative newsroom. When Agence France-Presse (AFP) used Trint at COP28 in Dubai, reporters live transcribed comments from political leaders as they left the keynote stage. However, importantly, those live transcripts were shared in real time with remote colleagues who could rewind, playback and verify quotes in the moment, while the conversation was still happening. And that meant the team could publish quotes almost immediately - and before the competition!
Verdict: Otter is great for a record of your meetings. Trint is purpose-built for the "simultaneous access" chaos of a breaking news environment.
Otter.ai’s cost effective price point is often heralded as one of its strengths - and quite rightly.
Otter.ai offers its AI note taking capabilities at a relatively low cost that will delight students, individuals, and small business teams. And given what Otter.ai will let them do with the toolkit, it makes perfect sense for such users to leverage Otter.ai.
On the other hand, Trint is a premium, subscription-heavy product. It is built, and therefore priced, for the larger enterprise. Organizations are paying for the wider ecosystem - the live collaboration + verification, seamless integrations with existing apps, multiple languages, and choice of data residency and data privacy frameworks.
Verdict: If you just require meeting notes and action items, Otter.ai is the better option for your budget. But news and sports media teams aren't buying transcripts; they’re seeking content velocity, multi-lingual support and protection of sources. Trint’s higher cost is justified by the hours of labor saved in the end to end media workflow.
Choose Otter.ai if:
Choose Trint if:
In short, Otter.ai is fantastic at taking notes. Meanwhile Trint connects the newsroom’s workflow. For media organizations, that distinction is worth the investment.
