16 ms·

Tell HN: Otter.ai bot recording meetings without consent

612 points by arcticfox 4y ago

I occasionally use Otter.ai to transcribe when I'm multitasking. Recently they made an update, which I carefully opted out of, to automatically join every meeting through my Google Calendar and transcribe it. Screenshots prove I had the feature disabled. The bot proceeded to join two confidential meetings on my behalf and record the whole thing, then email every member an absurd, inaccurate "outline" after. I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. I have opened a support ticket with screenshots but there is no response, and according to Twitter they are essentially not reviewing tickets from free users at the moment. So just a heads-up to the HN community! Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend?

jharohit 4y ago
https://www.avoma.com/ https://www.avoma.com/ we use for sales. very tight controls
that_guy_iain 4y ago
> I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. I have opened a support ticket with screenshots but there is no response, and according to Twitter they are essentially not reviewing tickets from free users at the moment. Important thing here is, you're not a customer. > Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Probably not, since this is probably a bug that can affect any of these applications. And privacy focused apps are a niche and a niche that isn't that much fun to develop. The nature of these apps lean towards people who aren't privacy focused since you would be allowing a third party to listen to calls which is the opposite of privacy. You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sp332 4y ago
  How are they going to upsell people to paid tiers if the free product is malfunctioning?
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    Let's be serious, if the bug exists it'll exist on all versions. So they'll fix it. But they'll be responding to customers and not resource drains.
- bogwog 4y ago
  > Important thing here is, you're not a customer. That’s not the important thing at all. The important thing is the Otter.ai is violating the privacy of its users, potentially even breaking laws in some jurisdictions. If anything, it raises some more red flags that they’re ignoring consent for free users, since that could be interpreted as an attempt to monetize them by collecting data (again, without consent) If you don’t want non-paying users, then don’t offer a free tier. You don’t get a free pass to do whatever you want to a user just because they aren’t using your paid plan.
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    Yeah, gotta "love" the 'we can break the law cause you didn't pay' HN philosophy. I would derive great enjoyment of them in court in a 2 party state telling a judge "well since they weren't really a customer....."
    - that_guy_iain 4y ago
      In a 2 party state the user would be the one breaking the law. They installed the software... If you install recording software, you're liable for what it records. Bug or not bug, the liablity is yours. The only way you would get Otter.ai in a courtroom would be a civil case and then the not being a paying customer therefore no expectations of a warranty applies. Seriously, this thread is "I installed recording software and it worked on things I didn't think it would. This company is terrible." while most of us work in tech and know that bugs exist and have generally written some bugs. Worse case, it's a bug. The solution is to stop using it and move on. Or pay for support and have them fix it.
      - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
        > If you install recording software, you're liable for what it records not if it's recording without your consent > Seriously, this thread is "I installed recording software and it worked on things I didn't think it would. a poor attempt to reframe the thread, which is actually about a company monitoring confidential meetings without consent if affirmative consent is such a non-issue here, why couldn't the company get it?
- 6644logan 4y ago
  > You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want. A local transcription, manually triggered service would solve the concern I think. > You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want. I think there's a difference between free users with a "hey, my app is broken" complaint and "hey, you just did something incredibly wrong" complaint. It would be like if free Dropbox started uploading random files that it wasn't allowed to in the settings.
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    > I think there's a difference between free users with a "hey, my app is broken" complaint and "hey, you just did something incredibly wrong" complaint. It would be like if free Dropbox started uploading random files that it wasn't allowed to in the settings. The thing is, you would need to review each of the complaints to know which is which. If you're providing no support and because you're not taking money for the service there is no real liability (depending on the contract) being a non-customer would mean, if they do something incredibly wrong you need to get a new provider. If you're not a customer, you can't expect support. If you want support, pay $10 and then fill the ticket. It just annoys me when people complain about not getting support when they've not paid for anything.
    - mackmgg 4y ago
      > because you're not taking money for the service there is no real liability Just because you're not taking money doesn't mean you can break the law without liability! Even outside of GDPR/CCPA, most states require all parties to consent in recording and every state requires at least one party to consent in recording. I do agree that this is the kind of service worth paying for if you want privacy and I'm not a lawyer so I can't say that this is actually illegal, but if you're ignoring not just "hey this is incredibly wrong" tickets but "hey this is illegal and I'm warning you before I file an official complaint" that seems like it will end poorly.
    - 6644logan 4y ago
tlb 4y ago
Tangential, but I often wish I had screenshots to prove I'd opted in, or out, or otherwise done the right thing. It shouldn't be too expensive to record and index the screen whenever I'm doing something important online and keep it for a week.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Would be a privacy nightmare. But some companies do, using hotjar and other tools.
- failrate 4y ago
  Multiple products exist to take multiple screenshots over a time period including details on which application was in focus. This might be an approach thqt would work for you.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  Would a screenshot really prove anything, though? It would be trivial to modify
  - tlb 4y ago
    If it comes down to an I-said/they-said about whether I checked some box, then: - if it's my memory against their database, I'd probably lose. - if it's my video capture against their database, it could go either way. - if it's me and several others' videos against their database, we'd likely win. But besides the win-lose proposition, it'd be worth something to me to be confident whether I was right or not.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      But who are you trying to convince? If it's them, they can just say "ok so what" to your footage, it existing or not or coming from multiple people or not is not entirely relevant, as a company they can choose to use it or throw it away. If it's everyone else, why? What benefit does it get you to have others know you're right? You're still in the same position, with your choice discarded.
propogandist 4y ago
AI bot covertly joins company meetings to record conversations to monetize freemium users.
garysahota93 4y ago
This is why I use Clari Wingman instead.
mschuster91 4y ago
> I have opened a support ticket with screenshots but there is no response, and according to Twitter they are essentially not reviewing tickets from free users at the moment. Are you living somewhere covered by GDPR (=EU, UK, nordic states) or in California? If yes, complain at the data protection agency.
xyos 4y ago
I just deleted my account because of that, also they share conversations with everyone in the meeting by DEFAULT, it wasn't nice receiving a message from a co-worker telling me that he received an email with the transcription it generated.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Same, deleted my account over this. One of the most comically egregious UX fuckups I’ve ever seen. Maya Angelou is apposite: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
- arikr 4y ago
  Wtf, that's terrible UX.
  - yashap 4y ago
    For sure, it’s almost certainly a “growth hacking” attempt (they’re hoping the ppl they email signup to otter.ai), but a pretty terrible one. Every other similar growth hacking attempt I’ve seen will explicitly ask for consent before sending anything to non-users of the app. Overall, sounds like a VERY unscrupulous company, that you shouldn’t trust with your personal data.
  - kordlessagain 4y ago
    That's not what the UI says, or does. I signed up and actually looked, before posting.
  - refulgentis 4y ago
    Even more terrible is using a recording service when you're in a meeting with me, not telling me, then complaining the real problem is the service told me
    - chris_wot 4y ago
      He didn't want Otter.ai to transcribe. He had turned it off!
colechristensen 4y ago
There are plenty of places where this is illegal wiretapping, whether it’s you doing it or otterai is debatable. https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/ https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/
- mackmgg 4y ago
  In an all-party consent state you would need everyone in the call to consent for recording to be legal, but even in one-party consent states you would still at least need OP's consent to be recording! If the user says no and they record anyway, I can't think of any state where that's legal (though the EULA probably has something covering that, unsure if that holds up in court).
dsiroker 4y ago
We are building a privacy-first transcription & recording solution. Sign up at https://www.rewind.ai https://www.rewind.ai for early access or if you are super eager email me at dan@ at the domain above.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Unless it's entirely self-hostable and/or runs entirely locally on the user's machine, it's a hard pass from me. Also, this marketing copy makes your product sound a lot more like some kind of AI hype scam than an actual product: > What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? This question is why we founded Rewind. > > Our vision is to give humans perfect memory. > > We are building a search engine for your life.
  - satyrnein 4y ago
    That was a pretty good Black Mirror episode!
    - dsiroker 4y ago
      Fantastic episode! “The Entire History of You” The biggest difference is that I believe we would all be more honest with one another if we had perfect memory. It would prevent more marital strife than it would create.
      - satyrnein 4y ago
        I hope you're right, because that world is probably coming, but to play devil's advocate: The biggest difference is that I believe we would all be more honest with one another if we had perfect memory. This reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg believing the world would be a better place if we couldn't have multiple identities, because multiple identities showed a lack of integrity. It would prevent more marital strife than it would create. It depends on which way the causality goes in "forgive and forget"!
bombcar 4y ago
The big names provide recording and transcription now - Zoom has it, Teams has it (Teams apparently does it realtime and live and it's not bad, great for the deaf!). I suppose those are part of paid plans, and they trigger the "your shit is being recorded, dude." warnings.
- dleslie 4y ago
  Slack even has it.
- theguyovrthere 4y ago
  Webex...
- croes 4y ago
  Don't the need the permission of all participants to transcribe?
  - nvr219 4y ago
    No you do not - at least not technically! I had to look into this at work. I looked at WebEx, Teams, and Zoom - all three let auto-transcribe just roll. I think on one of them it gives a quick popup saying it's transcribing but no consent required. Contrast with audio/video recording where Zoom lets you either consent or leave the meeting. I asked our legal counsel and they said it's kind of iffy whether live auto-transcription counts as recording - didn't seem like a settled matter.
    - smachiz 4y ago
      In Teams at least, it's called transcription, but really it's captioning. It's not recorded unless you also turn on recording.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Can you cut the text out of the caption window before leaving? The one I saw it was appearing in chat (I think?).
encryptluks2 4y ago
Employee installs something on company computer and gives access to company content. Program does something nefarious but employee innocent.
- 6644logan 4y ago
  Um, yes? That's how it works with literally every piece of software that have any permissions locally. What if Google Chrome decided to do the same thing unilaterally?
  - chucksmash 4y ago
    Some security conscious organizations will ban all external software and then approve exceptions on a case by case basis as they pop up. In such a place, someone has already long ago submitted a ticket to have Google Chrome blessed and the employee installing Chrome is following regs.
    - arcticfox 4y ago
      Yes, in my case the CEO recommended we use Otter to keep all of the meetings on our dozens of projects straight. It's not that we didn't want to use it sometimes, it's that I had no desire to use it for these times and it went completely rogue. That could happen with any software, even an OS itself.
klyrs 4y ago
Depending on where you live, that might violate wiretapping laws. Most of North America requires at least one party consent.
- MrWiffles 4y ago
  I’m not in agreement with this idea, but i wonder if these companies could legally be considered a participant and therefore the one party consenting…
  - bigdict 4y ago
    Interesting thought, that's something that could be buried deep in a EULA.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    It probably counts as one-party consent, but not two. California requires two.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - wnoise 4y ago
      Although the standard description is "two-party", it's almost always really "all-party".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jwandborg 4y ago
  It could also not count as wiretapping, since it's about transcription, not about audio recordings. If the transcription service's presence in the call isn't hidden from other participants, is it still wiretapping?
  - klyrs 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
toomuchtodo 4y ago
File a complaint with the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ If you're in a two party consent state, probably worth the effort to file a complaint with your state's attorney general.
puma_ambit 4y ago
I stopped using them when I saw they share with everyone by default. I wanted the notes only for myself so I could be more present in meetings but not at the expense of making everyone feel like they have to watch what they're saying because it's being transcribed.
- formerly_proven 4y ago
  That approach sounds like a potential problem for more-than-one party consent jurisdictions.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Even in one party consent jurisdictions you're not just allowed to send a copy off to whoever you like. Often it's permitted for personal review or for gathering evidence, but it's not necessarily allowed to sell the conversation (or send it to a third party in exchange for something else, like this transcription).
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  That's really only just hiding the fact that they should be watching what they're saying, though. If someone is sending a copy of our private conversation to a random third party, I'd certainly like to know about it. If anything, this "warning" only makes me trust this service more because I don't have to wonder if this service is listening in.
  - urchinskb 4y ago
    "by default". I assume sharing can be turned off by the user.
fudged71 4y ago
I have been a user of Grain for a while, and I appreciate that it auto-joins all of my meetings. However, in a couple of situations it has been with non-tech people who were absolutely confused "what this is" and I didn't see an easy way to disable ahead of time for specific meetings or specific participants. These tools need a lot more UX work considering the sensitivity of the outcomes.
Bakary 4y ago
Is there such a thing as a simple audio transcribing system that can turn a recording into a text file? I have this problem where I sometimes forget a sentence someone JUST told me. And often my notes aren't sufficient compared to a verbatim recording because I'm liable to forget important contextual info very rapidly. But dealing with raw audio files is a PITA.
- kevmo314 4y ago
  Turn on closed captioning?
  - Bakary 4y ago
    The more uncomfortable truth is that I'd rather be able to record on a separate device because I will get in trouble for it if it comes to light. It is legal in my region, but people will be (very rightfully) creeped out by it and are unlikely to ever buy my short term memory sob story. OP mentioned multitasking so maybe they had a similar version of this problem. People aren't going to be happily recorded just for the purpose of someone wanting to preserve their own energy during meetings.
    - closewith 4y ago
      > It is legal in my region, but people will be (very rightfully) creeped out by it and are unlikely to ever buy my short term memory sob story. Okay, so maybe it's best if you don't do it then?
      - Bakary 4y ago
        No, because no harm is done once I delete the files after looking over the notes, and I am able to perform my job far better than otherwise. It's just that from an outside perspective it is unlikely to sound innocuous despite being so. It's a bit like those 'wait I can explain' situations in sitcoms.
        4y ago
sorokod 4y ago
"I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation" On the plus side you have been given a valuable lesson. For example: you may be more of a privacy person that you thought, you may want to be more careful about sharing your data. You may want to consider if you are paying for a service or not makes any difference in the way your data is handled.
- leaflets2 4y ago
  And we others here too? :-)
- warkdarrior 4y ago
  Since tracking and selling of data, in general, is free revenue on top of any service fees, it seems to me that successful companies will over time trend towards service fees AND tracking/selling personal data.
  - sorokod 4y ago
    I agree except that such company need not be successful nor do this over time. Every day a company is not selling your data, it is "leaving money on the table" - a mortal sin.
user3939382 4y ago
Is anyone here a lawyer that can explain the ramifications of this in all party consent states?
neilv 4y ago
I don't know whether this is bumping into a complicated legal area of audio recording consent, but your company might want to ask a lawyer (about any wrongs to the company, any obligations the company has, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#... If you're not the head of the company, you could raise it with a higher level of management, or ask in-house counsel.
- ShakataGaNai 4y ago
  IANAL But transcriptions of calls don't GENERALLY run into the multi-party consent state laws, because the concept of a non-human listening/transcribing a call didn't exist when most of those laws were created. So if the service doesn't keep a copy of the recording (they just transcribe on the fly), then it's probably legal. That being said, most services do announce themselves in someway to cover the legal grey areas. Plus it's the right thing to do ethically.
  - unstatusthequo 4y ago
    How do you know recordings aren’t kept? For “quality control?” And they probably are recorded and cached. Even if for a minute, that violates statutes. Statutes don’t care about some progressive overbroad app.
mikeryan 4y ago
Otter has had some issues in the past around their practices. It’s used a lot by reporters. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/16/my-journey-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-every-journalists-favorite-app-00009216 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/16/my-journey-down-the...
tchock23 4y ago
Does anyone know of a good app for voice journaling? I use Otter for that purpose exclusively, and between this news and their recent UI changes to make the record/stop button tiny on their iOS app I'd like to seek an alternative. I use DayOne for written journals and know it offers voice capabilities, but the limits are pretty short. I'd like something more akin to Otter.
andrewmutz 4y ago
Tangential question: I know that wiretapping laws in many states require everyone to be notified if a recording is being made. Does anyone know if the same applies to a transcription?
closewith 4y ago
> I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. This is part of the reason why it's important to have strong privacy protections, even if it doesn't feel like privacy issues have impacted you personally. Eventually everyone has their private data abused.
jorams 4y ago
> The bot proceeded to join two confidential meetings on my behalf and record the whole thing, then email every member an absurd, inaccurate "outline" after. Can you explain how it was able to do this, apparently without people noticing? From what I understand it joins the meeting as a participant, which would be pretty obvious?
- squeaky-clean 4y ago
  I'm curious about this too. Possibly some large internal meeting, like a company quarterly update on performance and plans going forward? If there's 200 attendees someone might not notice a random one. Though Google still requires approval whenever someone outside your domain joins a meeting, so I feel like that would get caught easily too.
- arcticfox 4y ago
  To clarify, it joined as a very obvious user. It was not without people noticing, they didn't really seem to care but I did. I was not the meeting organizer so I could not kick it and didn't want to derail the discussion with explaining how I couldn't control my own computer (great look in front of clients), so we just proceeded with it recording. The automatically emailed outline afterwards was the cherry on top, though, as it was filled with AI generated questions that I absolutely did not need answered. I got one response from someone that patiently explained some of the answers to the (idiotic) questions - how embarrassing.
JAA1337 4y ago
Are you serious??!? This feels like an abuse of trust.
znpy 4y ago
You can probably get a lawyer and bring otter.ai to court, to pay you good money. That will surely make them stop, or at least seriously reconsider their strategy.
userhacker 4y ago
I created revoldiv.com. It's privacy focused and login is not required to transcribe. You can record your meeting and upload the video or audio to transcribe it
- jjbinx007 4y ago
  Maybe I'm being stupid but when I try to export the audio as a text file I just get a file without any spaces in. Is this by design?
qskousen 4y ago
My work just started using https://fireflies.ai/ https://fireflies.ai/ , no affiliation but it seems to work alright.
mrsnowman123 4y ago
Otter_ai 4y ago
[flagged]
- comboy 4y ago
  Your reaction to the post tells me more about the company than the post itself. And the sad reality is that while some users from this thread may never touch it, it's likely that nobody at the company will ever suffer any consequences, and the whole incident may be EV+ because more users join after hearing about it than leaving.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  Seems like an insidious default setting.
  - elliekelly 4y ago
    OP said they have the setting toggled off. Regardless whoever decided to make this “feature” opt out rather than opt in made a terrible decision.
- smashah 4y ago
  Sounds like some copywriting/SEO ai wrote this ridiculous response.
  - Ueland 4y ago
    Yeah, they are literally just spamming the same everywhere: https://twitter.com/otter_ai/status/1567568010680111104 https://twitter.com/otter_ai/status/1567568010680111104 Talk about dumpster fire
- fmntf 4y ago
  That's a nice politically correct statement. Now, would you mind to answer the OP?
- tdeck 4y ago
  I understand people's reaction in downvotoing this impersonal canned response, but I think it's worth keeping it visible for other readers to understand how Otter chooses to officially respond to the complaint.
_zzaw 4y ago
This is egregious—and potentially illegal—enough that I suspect it's unintentional (bug, bad UX, misconfiguration, etc), but given how accustomed all of us are to the obnoxious, grubby tactics favored by tech companies, I'm not remotely surprised that the immediate assumption is that it was an intentional, malicious decision. That's the problem with the selfish, user-hostile approach that a lot of businesses seem to think is acceptable. Short-term, maybe it works, but it breeds a deep cynicism and suspicion that no company should want in its customers. When things go wrong—and they will—you will not be given any benefit of the doubt, nor will you deserve it.
_narendra_ 4y ago
> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Everyone seems to be concerned about otter.ai and their bad practices. Can someone please answer this question as well?
karanmg 4y ago
> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Yes. Try https://aliceapp.ai https://aliceapp.ai, the iOS app's in the AppStore: https://aliceapp.ai/app https://aliceapp.ai/app. I created this specifically to be as privacy conscious as possible. There's a small, but strong team of engineers behind this and I'm the primary investor. It's not perfect, but works pretty well, with many relying on it everyday. From the FAQs: https://aliceapp.ai/faqs https://aliceapp.ai/faqs Is Alice secure? * We don't ask for your name. * We don't require your real email address, nor your phone number. * We don't use passwords to login, to avoid easy or re-usable passwords. The login process is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) by design. * We don't track your location. * We don't ask for access to your contacts. * We don't ask you to allow push notifications. * We don't store your credit card information in our database. * We don't use tools like Google Analytics to track your behavior. * We don't drop any cookies from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera (i.e. any social network) to track browsing habits. * We aren't on social networks. Our focus is on the product and on communicating directly with you via email, text or phone. We are not into the game of getting "likes". * We don't prompt you to give us a five-star rating on the App Store. * We don't annoy you with newsletter signup popups. * We don't serve you ads. * Alice is only listening when it's obviously recording. Otherwise the mic is off by default.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It's unfortunate you were downvoted. Perhaps it's because you're self-promoting, but you were up front about it and your pitch was relevant and focused on user needs.
  - karanmg 4y ago
    Thank you. It is up to us to do something about making our software more privacy conscious. And management/leaders/founders have to put up the money to support it. This project is also an experiment to see if its possible to build a "successful" app without user behavior tracking, without endless AB testing.. and so far it seems totally possible.
    - 4y ago
anigbrowl 4y ago
Sonix.ai does a good job, though I don't know how it is for integration with meetings etc., it's aimed more at audio/video producers.
cedricd 4y ago
I've been liking https://fathom.video https://fathom.video a lot. Integrates well with Zoom. I think you can choose which recordings are shared with teams -- and their transcription is pretty good.
dundalk03 4y ago
Yeah check out Trint.com. Their privacy and security are unparallel and they don’t listen to any conversations.
hiidrew 4y ago
This is unfortunate. I was a fan of the service in grad school, used it a lot for qualitative interviews. I hope you can find a better service, the comment on Alice looks promising.
T3RMINATED 4y ago
fxtentacle 4y ago
I would love to recommend it already, but my self-built privacy oriented real-time transcription service isn't ready for release yet. You can join my email waiting list [1], though. I tried to discover something that would stand the scrutiny of a German "Ausschreibung", which is a government call for bids. They require things to be GDPR-compliant by law, and they recently disqualified companies for using on-prem solutions by US Cloud providers with the argument that if it's a US company, the NSA can still force them to disclose GDPR-protected data. I reviewed all offerings I could find on the market. I couldn't find anything good, which is when I decided to build my own. For what it's worth, I also published a paper on improving German ASR already [4]. In my opinion, the only 100% offline and, hence, 100% private solutions that are ready to use right now are VOSK and Coqui STT. But their recognition quality is atrocious. Like pre-2016 word-error-rate on LibriSpeech / CommonVoice. Then there's Scribosermo, which is converted NVIDIA models, so it comes with a lot of rules for how you're allowed to use it, and quality is still worse than all US clouds and it's quite slow, like 2s delay. In addition to that, I could only find companies who more or less openly re-sell the cloud AI solutions from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Alibaba. But that won't fly for German government bids [2]. I believe your best option is to wait for me ;) to finish my local tool [1] which will have a WebRTC server so that you can just script it however you want :) And your second best option is probably to use HuggingFace Transformers with Facebook's pre-trained base models [3]. [1] https://madmimi.com/signups/f0da3b13840d40ce9e061cafea6280d5/join https://madmimi.com/signups/f0da3b13840d40ce9e061cafea6280d5... [2] https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=VK_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_-_1_VK_23/22 https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=VK_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg... [3] https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-wav2vec2-english https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-wav2vec2-english [4] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/tevr-improving-speech-recognition-by-token https://paperswithcode.com/paper/tevr-improving-speech-recog...
ricwo 4y ago
> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Still early days, but we’re working on a privacy-first solution (cogram.com). We’re looking for beta testers at the moment. Email us at founders@cogram.com if you’re interested!
rwhitman 4y ago
I rely on Otter pretty heavily these days. 100% agree that recording and sending the transcript to meeting attendees without their knowledge is a really bad move from several angles. I work sales calls set up with Calendly and Otter joins them all. These are very technical so normally it's fantastic - EXCEPT if we start talking early or the prospect doesn't follow the invite and never joins the call, then they would get a transcript of my team's chatter. I learned to not allow Otter to join the call until everyone is in attendance Whats more frustrating is that you can't disable this auto-email "feature" unless you are on a business plan of some sort. But I have a paid plan through the iPhone app and apparently can't convert it to a business plan associated with my company. So no good way to disable it I get the network effect of referral business but sharing private conversations without consent is not the way to achieve it.
- mike_d 4y ago
  I now refuse to join sales meetings setup by vendors. Any meeting has to be on Google Meet using our domain because of dumb shit like Gong, Otter, and other stuff that records our employees without permission.
  - f4ncyp4ntz 4y ago
    [dead]
latetomato 4y ago
THANK YOU for posting this. My partner uses Otter, and HIS Otter bot will join my work meetings that he is not even invited to. He's sent me some recordings within the app in the past and we share calendars, but it still doesn't explain why this would happen. We've emailed Otter multiple times since July 2021 without any satisfactory response or investigation. You'd think they would take this privacy issue more seriously. Truly absurd.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
>I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. Oh, most people aren’t either. Until they get burned. Then suddenly privacy becomes a major concern for them. I feel there’s a nugget of wisdom in here for you!
unstatusthequo 4y ago
Awful. The developer, and everyone using any sort of recording software, should be aware of jurisdiction consent laws regarding conversation recording. Here’s a good start: https://recordinglaw.com/ https://recordinglaw.com/
chris_wot 4y ago
So... if you care at all about confidentiality, then choose anyone but Otter.ai?
userbinator 4y ago
I've recently noticed that whenever I end up having to use services like Teams that try to automatically transcribe or notify me that such is happening, I tend to unconsciously start skewing my accent and general speech patterns to make that harder, perhaps as a subtle form of protest. Meanwhile, the humans don't seem to find it more difficult to understand. Now I'm even more inclined to do it by default... Unfortunately I don't know enough about STT/DSP to write a filter that can turn speech into something that completely fucks up AIs (bonus points for making them produce entirely different but plausibly correct words) while still remaining decently comprehensible to humans, or I'd give it a try.
sootty 4y ago
1. Emailing the participants the summary without a permission to control it can be pretty damaging. 2. Were the meetings it joined set up before you disabled that feature? It is likely that they were already in the system and your off flag only kicks in for future meetings? 3. For auto-joining there is a tradeoff in the ease of use versus compliance. 4. I am the founder of Wingman - the way we handle this is a) You have the option of not syncing your calendar and only adding meetings you want recorded manually b) The meeting participants can request the recording - it isn't automatically emailed to anyone c) You can choose to only record external meetings or internal + external meetings d) For an org-wide usecase, you have the option of making all your meeting recordings private by default
Abimelex 4y ago
There is a startup from my region doing it, but I never tested it, so I can't say anything about the quality: https://www.speechmind.com/ https://www.speechmind.com/
tough 4y ago
Look at the incentives, will this bad UX move or dark pattern pro plan subscription numba go up? You have your answer
arkothiwala 4y ago
[dead]

612 points by arcticfox 4y ago

jharohit 4y ago

https://www.avoma.com/ https://www.avoma.com/ we use for sales. very tight controls

that_guy_iain 4y ago

> I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. I have opened a support ticket with screenshots but there is no response, and according to Twitter they are essentially not reviewing tickets from free users at the moment. Important thing here is, you're not a customer. > Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Probably not, since this is probably a bug that can affect any of these applications. And privacy focused apps are a niche and a niche that isn't that much fun to develop. The nature of these apps lean towards people who aren't privacy focused since you would be allowing a third party to listen to calls which is the opposite of privacy. You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
sp332 4y ago
How are they going to upsell people to paid tiers if the free product is malfunctioning?
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  Let's be serious, if the bug exists it'll exist on all versions. So they'll fix it. But they'll be responding to customers and not resource drains.
bogwog 4y ago
> Important thing here is, you're not a customer. That’s not the important thing at all. The important thing is the Otter.ai is violating the privacy of its users, potentially even breaking laws in some jurisdictions. If anything, it raises some more red flags that they’re ignoring consent for free users, since that could be interpreted as an attempt to monetize them by collecting data (again, without consent) If you don’t want non-paying users, then don’t offer a free tier. You don’t get a free pass to do whatever you want to a user just because they aren’t using your paid plan.
- noasaservice 4y ago
  Yeah, gotta "love" the 'we can break the law cause you didn't pay' HN philosophy. I would derive great enjoyment of them in court in a 2 party state telling a judge "well since they weren't really a customer....."
  - that_guy_iain 4y ago
    In a 2 party state the user would be the one breaking the law. They installed the software... If you install recording software, you're liable for what it records. Bug or not bug, the liablity is yours. The only way you would get Otter.ai in a courtroom would be a civil case and then the not being a paying customer therefore no expectations of a warranty applies. Seriously, this thread is "I installed recording software and it worked on things I didn't think it would. This company is terrible." while most of us work in tech and know that bugs exist and have generally written some bugs. Worse case, it's a bug. The solution is to stop using it and move on. Or pay for support and have them fix it.
    - ImPostingOnHN 4y ago
      > If you install recording software, you're liable for what it records not if it's recording without your consent > Seriously, this thread is "I installed recording software and it worked on things I didn't think it would. a poor attempt to reframe the thread, which is actually about a company monitoring confidential meetings without consent if affirmative consent is such a non-issue here, why couldn't the company get it?
6644logan 4y ago
> You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want. A local transcription, manually triggered service would solve the concern I think. > You don't need a more privacy focused app, you just need another app and probably to become a customer so you can get the support you clearly want. I think there's a difference between free users with a "hey, my app is broken" complaint and "hey, you just did something incredibly wrong" complaint. It would be like if free Dropbox started uploading random files that it wasn't allowed to in the settings.
- that_guy_iain 4y ago
  > I think there's a difference between free users with a "hey, my app is broken" complaint and "hey, you just did something incredibly wrong" complaint. It would be like if free Dropbox started uploading random files that it wasn't allowed to in the settings. The thing is, you would need to review each of the complaints to know which is which. If you're providing no support and because you're not taking money for the service there is no real liability (depending on the contract) being a non-customer would mean, if they do something incredibly wrong you need to get a new provider. If you're not a customer, you can't expect support. If you want support, pay $10 and then fill the ticket. It just annoys me when people complain about not getting support when they've not paid for anything.
  - mackmgg 4y ago
    > because you're not taking money for the service there is no real liability Just because you're not taking money doesn't mean you can break the law without liability! Even outside of GDPR/CCPA, most states require all parties to consent in recording and every state requires at least one party to consent in recording. I do agree that this is the kind of service worth paying for if you want privacy and I'm not a lawyer so I can't say that this is actually illegal, but if you're ignoring not just "hey this is incredibly wrong" tickets but "hey this is illegal and I'm warning you before I file an official complaint" that seems like it will end poorly.
  - 6644logan 4y ago

tlb 4y ago

Tangential, but I often wish I had screenshots to prove I'd opted in, or out, or otherwise done the right thing. It shouldn't be too expensive to record and index the screen whenever I'm doing something important online and keep it for a week.

that_guy_iain 4y ago
Would be a privacy nightmare. But some companies do, using hotjar and other tools.
failrate 4y ago
Multiple products exist to take multiple screenshots over a time period including details on which application was in focus. This might be an approach thqt would work for you.
cortesoft 4y ago
Would a screenshot really prove anything, though? It would be trivial to modify
- tlb 4y ago
  If it comes down to an I-said/they-said about whether I checked some box, then: - if it's my memory against their database, I'd probably lose. - if it's my video capture against their database, it could go either way. - if it's me and several others' videos against their database, we'd likely win. But besides the win-lose proposition, it'd be worth something to me to be confident whether I was right or not.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    But who are you trying to convince? If it's them, they can just say "ok so what" to your footage, it existing or not or coming from multiple people or not is not entirely relevant, as a company they can choose to use it or throw it away. If it's everyone else, why? What benefit does it get you to have others know you're right? You're still in the same position, with your choice discarded.

propogandist 4y ago

AI bot covertly joins company meetings to record conversations to monetize freemium users.

garysahota93 4y ago

This is why I use Clari Wingman instead.

mschuster91 4y ago

> I have opened a support ticket with screenshots but there is no response, and according to Twitter they are essentially not reviewing tickets from free users at the moment. Are you living somewhere covered by GDPR (=EU, UK, nordic states) or in California? If yes, complain at the data protection agency.

xyos 4y ago

I just deleted my account because of that, also they share conversations with everyone in the meeting by DEFAULT, it wasn't nice receiving a message from a co-worker telling me that he received an email with the transcription it generated.

darkteflon 4y ago
Same, deleted my account over this. One of the most comically egregious UX fuckups I’ve ever seen. Maya Angelou is apposite: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
arikr 4y ago
Wtf, that's terrible UX.
- yashap 4y ago
  For sure, it’s almost certainly a “growth hacking” attempt (they’re hoping the ppl they email signup to otter.ai), but a pretty terrible one. Every other similar growth hacking attempt I’ve seen will explicitly ask for consent before sending anything to non-users of the app. Overall, sounds like a VERY unscrupulous company, that you shouldn’t trust with your personal data.
- kordlessagain 4y ago
  That's not what the UI says, or does. I signed up and actually looked, before posting.
- refulgentis 4y ago
  Even more terrible is using a recording service when you're in a meeting with me, not telling me, then complaining the real problem is the service told me
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    He didn't want Otter.ai to transcribe. He had turned it off!

colechristensen 4y ago

There are plenty of places where this is illegal wiretapping, whether it’s you doing it or otterai is debatable. https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/ https://recordinglaw.com/party-two-party-consent-states/

mackmgg 4y ago
In an all-party consent state you would need everyone in the call to consent for recording to be legal, but even in one-party consent states you would still at least need OP's consent to be recording! If the user says no and they record anyway, I can't think of any state where that's legal (though the EULA probably has something covering that, unsure if that holds up in court).

dsiroker 4y ago

We are building a privacy-first transcription & recording solution. Sign up at https://www.rewind.ai https://www.rewind.ai for early access or if you are super eager email me at dan@ at the domain above.

nerdponx 4y ago
Unless it's entirely self-hostable and/or runs entirely locally on the user's machine, it's a hard pass from me. Also, this marketing copy makes your product sound a lot more like some kind of AI hype scam than an actual product: > What if we could use technology to augment our memory the same way a hearing aid can augment our hearing? This question is why we founded Rewind. > > Our vision is to give humans perfect memory. > > We are building a search engine for your life.
- satyrnein 4y ago
  That was a pretty good Black Mirror episode!
  - dsiroker 4y ago
    Fantastic episode! “The Entire History of You” The biggest difference is that I believe we would all be more honest with one another if we had perfect memory. It would prevent more marital strife than it would create.
    - satyrnein 4y ago
      I hope you're right, because that world is probably coming, but to play devil's advocate: The biggest difference is that I believe we would all be more honest with one another if we had perfect memory. This reminds me of Mark Zuckerberg believing the world would be a better place if we couldn't have multiple identities, because multiple identities showed a lack of integrity. It would prevent more marital strife than it would create. It depends on which way the causality goes in "forgive and forget"!

bombcar 4y ago

The big names provide recording and transcription now - Zoom has it, Teams has it (Teams apparently does it realtime and live and it's not bad, great for the deaf!). I suppose those are part of paid plans, and they trigger the "your shit is being recorded, dude." warnings.

dleslie 4y ago
Slack even has it.
theguyovrthere 4y ago
Webex...
croes 4y ago
Don't the need the permission of all participants to transcribe?
- nvr219 4y ago
  No you do not - at least not technically! I had to look into this at work. I looked at WebEx, Teams, and Zoom - all three let auto-transcribe just roll. I think on one of them it gives a quick popup saying it's transcribing but no consent required. Contrast with audio/video recording where Zoom lets you either consent or leave the meeting. I asked our legal counsel and they said it's kind of iffy whether live auto-transcription counts as recording - didn't seem like a settled matter.
  - smachiz 4y ago
    In Teams at least, it's called transcription, but really it's captioning. It's not recorded unless you also turn on recording.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Can you cut the text out of the caption window before leaving? The one I saw it was appearing in chat (I think?).

encryptluks2 4y ago

Employee installs something on company computer and gives access to company content. Program does something nefarious but employee innocent.

6644logan 4y ago
Um, yes? That's how it works with literally every piece of software that have any permissions locally. What if Google Chrome decided to do the same thing unilaterally?
- chucksmash 4y ago
  Some security conscious organizations will ban all external software and then approve exceptions on a case by case basis as they pop up. In such a place, someone has already long ago submitted a ticket to have Google Chrome blessed and the employee installing Chrome is following regs.
  - arcticfox 4y ago
    Yes, in my case the CEO recommended we use Otter to keep all of the meetings on our dozens of projects straight. It's not that we didn't want to use it sometimes, it's that I had no desire to use it for these times and it went completely rogue. That could happen with any software, even an OS itself.

klyrs 4y ago

Depending on where you live, that might violate wiretapping laws. Most of North America requires at least one party consent.

MrWiffles 4y ago
I’m not in agreement with this idea, but i wonder if these companies could legally be considered a participant and therefore the one party consenting…
- bigdict 4y ago
  Interesting thought, that's something that could be buried deep in a EULA.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  It probably counts as one-party consent, but not two. California requires two.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wnoise 4y ago
    Although the standard description is "two-party", it's almost always really "all-party".
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jwandborg 4y ago
It could also not count as wiretapping, since it's about transcription, not about audio recordings. If the transcription service's presence in the call isn't hidden from other participants, is it still wiretapping?
- klyrs 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

toomuchtodo 4y ago

File a complaint with the FTC. https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/ If you're in a two party consent state, probably worth the effort to file a complaint with your state's attorney general.

puma_ambit 4y ago

I stopped using them when I saw they share with everyone by default. I wanted the notes only for myself so I could be more present in meetings but not at the expense of making everyone feel like they have to watch what they're saying because it's being transcribed.

formerly_proven 4y ago
That approach sounds like a potential problem for more-than-one party consent jurisdictions.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Even in one party consent jurisdictions you're not just allowed to send a copy off to whoever you like. Often it's permitted for personal review or for gathering evidence, but it's not necessarily allowed to sell the conversation (or send it to a third party in exchange for something else, like this transcription).
jeroenhd 4y ago
That's really only just hiding the fact that they should be watching what they're saying, though. If someone is sending a copy of our private conversation to a random third party, I'd certainly like to know about it. If anything, this "warning" only makes me trust this service more because I don't have to wonder if this service is listening in.
- urchinskb 4y ago
  "by default". I assume sharing can be turned off by the user.

fudged71 4y ago

I have been a user of Grain for a while, and I appreciate that it auto-joins all of my meetings. However, in a couple of situations it has been with non-tech people who were absolutely confused "what this is" and I didn't see an easy way to disable ahead of time for specific meetings or specific participants. These tools need a lot more UX work considering the sensitivity of the outcomes.

Bakary 4y ago

Is there such a thing as a simple audio transcribing system that can turn a recording into a text file? I have this problem where I sometimes forget a sentence someone JUST told me. And often my notes aren't sufficient compared to a verbatim recording because I'm liable to forget important contextual info very rapidly. But dealing with raw audio files is a PITA.

kevmo314 4y ago
Turn on closed captioning?
- Bakary 4y ago
  The more uncomfortable truth is that I'd rather be able to record on a separate device because I will get in trouble for it if it comes to light. It is legal in my region, but people will be (very rightfully) creeped out by it and are unlikely to ever buy my short term memory sob story. OP mentioned multitasking so maybe they had a similar version of this problem. People aren't going to be happily recorded just for the purpose of someone wanting to preserve their own energy during meetings.
  - closewith 4y ago
    > It is legal in my region, but people will be (very rightfully) creeped out by it and are unlikely to ever buy my short term memory sob story. Okay, so maybe it's best if you don't do it then?
    - Bakary 4y ago
      No, because no harm is done once I delete the files after looking over the notes, and I am able to perform my job far better than otherwise. It's just that from an outside perspective it is unlikely to sound innocuous despite being so. It's a bit like those 'wait I can explain' situations in sitcoms.
      - 4y ago

sorokod 4y ago

"I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation" On the plus side you have been given a valuable lesson. For example: you may be more of a privacy person that you thought, you may want to be more careful about sharing your data. You may want to consider if you are paying for a service or not makes any difference in the way your data is handled.

leaflets2 4y ago
And we others here too? :-)
warkdarrior 4y ago
Since tracking and selling of data, in general, is free revenue on top of any service fees, it seems to me that successful companies will over time trend towards service fees AND tracking/selling personal data.
- sorokod 4y ago
  I agree except that such company need not be successful nor do this over time. Every day a company is not selling your data, it is "leaving money on the table" - a mortal sin.

user3939382 4y ago

Is anyone here a lawyer that can explain the ramifications of this in all party consent states?

neilv 4y ago

I don't know whether this is bumping into a complicated legal area of audio recording consent, but your company might want to ask a lawyer (about any wrongs to the company, any obligations the company has, etc.). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recording_laws#... If you're not the head of the company, you could raise it with a higher level of management, or ask in-house counsel.

ShakataGaNai 4y ago
IANAL But transcriptions of calls don't GENERALLY run into the multi-party consent state laws, because the concept of a non-human listening/transcribing a call didn't exist when most of those laws were created. So if the service doesn't keep a copy of the recording (they just transcribe on the fly), then it's probably legal. That being said, most services do announce themselves in someway to cover the legal grey areas. Plus it's the right thing to do ethically.
- unstatusthequo 4y ago
  How do you know recordings aren’t kept? For “quality control?” And they probably are recorded and cached. Even if for a minute, that violates statutes. Statutes don’t care about some progressive overbroad app.

mikeryan 4y ago

Otter has had some issues in the past around their practices. It’s used a lot by reporters. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/16/my-journey-down-the-rabbit-hole-of-every-journalists-favorite-app-00009216 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/16/my-journey-down-the...

tchock23 4y ago

Does anyone know of a good app for voice journaling? I use Otter for that purpose exclusively, and between this news and their recent UI changes to make the record/stop button tiny on their iOS app I'd like to seek an alternative. I use DayOne for written journals and know it offers voice capabilities, but the limits are pretty short. I'd like something more akin to Otter.

andrewmutz 4y ago

Tangential question: I know that wiretapping laws in many states require everyone to be notified if a recording is being made. Does anyone know if the same applies to a transcription?

closewith 4y ago

> I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. This is part of the reason why it's important to have strong privacy protections, even if it doesn't feel like privacy issues have impacted you personally. Eventually everyone has their private data abused.

jorams 4y ago

> The bot proceeded to join two confidential meetings on my behalf and record the whole thing, then email every member an absurd, inaccurate "outline" after. Can you explain how it was able to do this, apparently without people noticing? From what I understand it joins the meeting as a participant, which would be pretty obvious?

squeaky-clean 4y ago
I'm curious about this too. Possibly some large internal meeting, like a company quarterly update on performance and plans going forward? If there's 200 attendees someone might not notice a random one. Though Google still requires approval whenever someone outside your domain joins a meeting, so I feel like that would get caught easily too.
arcticfox 4y ago
To clarify, it joined as a very obvious user. It was not without people noticing, they didn't really seem to care but I did. I was not the meeting organizer so I could not kick it and didn't want to derail the discussion with explaining how I couldn't control my own computer (great look in front of clients), so we just proceeded with it recording. The automatically emailed outline afterwards was the cherry on top, though, as it was filled with AI generated questions that I absolutely did not need answered. I got one response from someone that patiently explained some of the answers to the (idiotic) questions - how embarrassing.

JAA1337 4y ago

Are you serious??!? This feels like an abuse of trust.

znpy 4y ago

You can probably get a lawyer and bring otter.ai to court, to pay you good money. That will surely make them stop, or at least seriously reconsider their strategy.

userhacker 4y ago

I created revoldiv.com. It's privacy focused and login is not required to transcribe. You can record your meeting and upload the video or audio to transcribe it

jjbinx007 4y ago
Maybe I'm being stupid but when I try to export the audio as a text file I just get a file without any spaces in. Is this by design?

qskousen 4y ago

My work just started using https://fireflies.ai/ https://fireflies.ai/ , no affiliation but it seems to work alright.

mrsnowman123 4y ago

Otter_ai 4y ago

[flagged]

comboy 4y ago
Your reaction to the post tells me more about the company than the post itself. And the sad reality is that while some users from this thread may never touch it, it's likely that nobody at the company will ever suffer any consequences, and the whole incident may be EV+ because more users join after hearing about it than leaving.
algoatecorn 4y ago
Seems like an insidious default setting.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  OP said they have the setting toggled off. Regardless whoever decided to make this “feature” opt out rather than opt in made a terrible decision.
smashah 4y ago
Sounds like some copywriting/SEO ai wrote this ridiculous response.
- Ueland 4y ago
  Yeah, they are literally just spamming the same everywhere: https://twitter.com/otter_ai/status/1567568010680111104 https://twitter.com/otter_ai/status/1567568010680111104 Talk about dumpster fire
fmntf 4y ago
That's a nice politically correct statement. Now, would you mind to answer the OP?
tdeck 4y ago
I understand people's reaction in downvotoing this impersonal canned response, but I think it's worth keeping it visible for other readers to understand how Otter chooses to officially respond to the complaint.

_zzaw 4y ago

This is egregious—and potentially illegal—enough that I suspect it's unintentional (bug, bad UX, misconfiguration, etc), but given how accustomed all of us are to the obnoxious, grubby tactics favored by tech companies, I'm not remotely surprised that the immediate assumption is that it was an intentional, malicious decision. That's the problem with the selfish, user-hostile approach that a lot of businesses seem to think is acceptable. Short-term, maybe it works, but it breeds a deep cynicism and suspicion that no company should want in its customers. When things go wrong—and they will—you will not be given any benefit of the doubt, nor will you deserve it.

_narendra_ 4y ago

> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Everyone seems to be concerned about otter.ai and their bad practices. Can someone please answer this question as well?

karanmg 4y ago

> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Yes. Try https://aliceapp.ai https://aliceapp.ai, the iOS app's in the AppStore: https://aliceapp.ai/app https://aliceapp.ai/app. I created this specifically to be as privacy conscious as possible. There's a small, but strong team of engineers behind this and I'm the primary investor. It's not perfect, but works pretty well, with many relying on it everyday. From the FAQs: https://aliceapp.ai/faqs https://aliceapp.ai/faqs Is Alice secure? * We don't ask for your name. * We don't require your real email address, nor your phone number. * We don't use passwords to login, to avoid easy or re-usable passwords. The login process is Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) by design. * We don't track your location. * We don't ask for access to your contacts. * We don't ask you to allow push notifications. * We don't store your credit card information in our database. * We don't use tools like Google Analytics to track your behavior. * We don't drop any cookies from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera (i.e. any social network) to track browsing habits. * We aren't on social networks. Our focus is on the product and on communicating directly with you via email, text or phone. We are not into the game of getting "likes". * We don't prompt you to give us a five-star rating on the App Store. * We don't annoy you with newsletter signup popups. * We don't serve you ads. * Alice is only listening when it's obviously recording. Otherwise the mic is off by default.

anigbrowl 4y ago
It's unfortunate you were downvoted. Perhaps it's because you're self-promoting, but you were up front about it and your pitch was relevant and focused on user needs.
- karanmg 4y ago
  Thank you. It is up to us to do something about making our software more privacy conscious. And management/leaders/founders have to put up the money to support it. This project is also an experiment to see if its possible to build a "successful" app without user behavior tracking, without endless AB testing.. and so far it seems totally possible.
  - 4y ago

anigbrowl 4y ago

Sonix.ai does a good job, though I don't know how it is for integration with meetings etc., it's aimed more at audio/video producers.

cedricd 4y ago

I've been liking https://fathom.video https://fathom.video a lot. Integrates well with Zoom. I think you can choose which recordings are shared with teams -- and their transcription is pretty good.

dundalk03 4y ago

Yeah check out Trint.com. Their privacy and security are unparallel and they don’t listen to any conversations.

hiidrew 4y ago

This is unfortunate. I was a fan of the service in grad school, used it a lot for qualitative interviews. I hope you can find a better service, the comment on Alice looks promising.

T3RMINATED 4y ago

fxtentacle 4y ago

I would love to recommend it already, but my self-built privacy oriented real-time transcription service isn't ready for release yet. You can join my email waiting list [1], though. I tried to discover something that would stand the scrutiny of a German "Ausschreibung", which is a government call for bids. They require things to be GDPR-compliant by law, and they recently disqualified companies for using on-prem solutions by US Cloud providers with the argument that if it's a US company, the NSA can still force them to disclose GDPR-protected data. I reviewed all offerings I could find on the market. I couldn't find anything good, which is when I decided to build my own. For what it's worth, I also published a paper on improving German ASR already [4]. In my opinion, the only 100% offline and, hence, 100% private solutions that are ready to use right now are VOSK and Coqui STT. But their recognition quality is atrocious. Like pre-2016 word-error-rate on LibriSpeech / CommonVoice. Then there's Scribosermo, which is converted NVIDIA models, so it comes with a lot of rules for how you're allowed to use it, and quality is still worse than all US clouds and it's quite slow, like 2s delay. In addition to that, I could only find companies who more or less openly re-sell the cloud AI solutions from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Alibaba. But that won't fly for German government bids [2]. I believe your best option is to wait for me ;) to finish my local tool [1] which will have a WebRTC server so that you can just script it however you want :) And your second best option is probably to use HuggingFace Transformers with Facebook's pre-trained base models [3]. [1] https://madmimi.com/signups/f0da3b13840d40ce9e061cafea6280d5/join https://madmimi.com/signups/f0da3b13840d40ce9e061cafea6280d5... [2] https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=VK_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg_-_1_VK_23/22 https://gdprhub.eu/index.php?title=VK_Baden-W%C3%BCrttemberg... [3] https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-wav2vec2-english https://huggingface.co/blog/fine-tune-wav2vec2-english [4] https://paperswithcode.com/paper/tevr-improving-speech-recognition-by-token https://paperswithcode.com/paper/tevr-improving-speech-recog...

ricwo 4y ago

> Are there other, more privacy oriented transcription services anyone can recommend? Still early days, but we’re working on a privacy-first solution (cogram.com). We’re looking for beta testers at the moment. Email us at founders@cogram.com if you’re interested!

rwhitman 4y ago

I rely on Otter pretty heavily these days. 100% agree that recording and sending the transcript to meeting attendees without their knowledge is a really bad move from several angles. I work sales calls set up with Calendly and Otter joins them all. These are very technical so normally it's fantastic - EXCEPT if we start talking early or the prospect doesn't follow the invite and never joins the call, then they would get a transcript of my team's chatter. I learned to not allow Otter to join the call until everyone is in attendance Whats more frustrating is that you can't disable this auto-email "feature" unless you are on a business plan of some sort. But I have a paid plan through the iPhone app and apparently can't convert it to a business plan associated with my company. So no good way to disable it I get the network effect of referral business but sharing private conversations without consent is not the way to achieve it.

mike_d 4y ago
I now refuse to join sales meetings setup by vendors. Any meeting has to be on Google Meet using our domain because of dumb shit like Gong, Otter, and other stuff that records our employees without permission.
- f4ncyp4ntz 4y ago
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latetomato 4y ago

THANK YOU for posting this. My partner uses Otter, and HIS Otter bot will join my work meetings that he is not even invited to. He's sent me some recordings within the app in the past and we share calendars, but it still doesn't explain why this would happen. We've emailed Otter multiple times since July 2021 without any satisfactory response or investigation. You'd think they would take this privacy issue more seriously. Truly absurd.

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

>I am not much of a privacy person but I feel completely abused in this situation. Oh, most people aren’t either. Until they get burned. Then suddenly privacy becomes a major concern for them. I feel there’s a nugget of wisdom in here for you!

unstatusthequo 4y ago

Awful. The developer, and everyone using any sort of recording software, should be aware of jurisdiction consent laws regarding conversation recording. Here’s a good start: https://recordinglaw.com/ https://recordinglaw.com/

chris_wot 4y ago

So... if you care at all about confidentiality, then choose anyone but Otter.ai?

userbinator 4y ago

I've recently noticed that whenever I end up having to use services like Teams that try to automatically transcribe or notify me that such is happening, I tend to unconsciously start skewing my accent and general speech patterns to make that harder, perhaps as a subtle form of protest. Meanwhile, the humans don't seem to find it more difficult to understand. Now I'm even more inclined to do it by default... Unfortunately I don't know enough about STT/DSP to write a filter that can turn speech into something that completely fucks up AIs (bonus points for making them produce entirely different but plausibly correct words) while still remaining decently comprehensible to humans, or I'd give it a try.

sootty 4y ago

1. Emailing the participants the summary without a permission to control it can be pretty damaging. 2. Were the meetings it joined set up before you disabled that feature? It is likely that they were already in the system and your off flag only kicks in for future meetings? 3. For auto-joining there is a tradeoff in the ease of use versus compliance. 4. I am the founder of Wingman - the way we handle this is a) You have the option of not syncing your calendar and only adding meetings you want recorded manually b) The meeting participants can request the recording - it isn't automatically emailed to anyone c) You can choose to only record external meetings or internal + external meetings d) For an org-wide usecase, you have the option of making all your meeting recordings private by default

Abimelex 4y ago

There is a startup from my region doing it, but I never tested it, so I can't say anything about the quality: https://www.speechmind.com/ https://www.speechmind.com/

tough 4y ago

Look at the incentives, will this bad UX move or dark pattern pro plan subscription numba go up? You have your answer

arkothiwala 4y ago

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