Otter's agent stops attending. Plan for that before you cancel.

The transcripts are the easy part of this move. Otter's actual advantage — a scheduled agent that joins a call whether or not you remember to — is the part that has no equivalent here, and the switch only goes well if that gap is planned for rather than discovered in the first missed meeting.

What Otter will hand you

Otter's own pricing page lists the export formats by plan: txt, pdf, docx and srt for the transcript text, and mp3 for the audio, with bulk export called out specifically on the Business tier. Open a conversation, use its export option, and choose the format — a plain text file if you just want the words, srt if you want timed captions, or the original mp3 if the audio itself matters.

That last one is worth pausing on. Not every migration guide mentions that Otter's export can include the audio and not only the transcript, and it is the file most people forget to pull before a subscription lapses — a transcript can be re-read, but a recording that mattered for a specific tone of voice or an exact wording cannot be recreated from someone's notes about it.

What the export does not settle

An export is about getting your own files out; it says nothing about what Otter already did with the audio before you asked for it. Otter's privacy policy lists training its own technology on de-identified audio recordings and transcriptions among the uses of meeting information, which is worth reading in full rather than through any comparison, including this one, if that question is part of why you are leaving. Exporting your files does not undo anything that already happened with a past recording — it only stops new ones from being added to the account. If the reason for the move is specifically about where audio has been rather than what you can walk away with, read the policy's exact wording before deciding, because a migration guide is not the place to settle that question for you.

Minutes, limits, and what they mean for an archive

Otter's own pricing page caps the free Basic plan at 300 transcription minutes a month and 30 minutes per conversation, so a long-time Basic user's history can be smaller than it feels: a call that ran past thirty minutes was not transcribed past that point, and no export recovers audio the plan never processed in the first place. Before assuming the export is complete, it is worth spot-checking a few older, longer meetings against your own memory of how long they actually ran. Pro raises the cap to ninety minutes a meeting and Business removes it, so accounts on those tiers are far less likely to have this gap, but it costs nothing to check either way before cancelling.

The part an export cannot replace

Otter's home page describes scheduling its AI Meeting Agent to join Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet calls automatically. That is real, useful, and something Coii AudioNotes was never built to do: it records the audio your Mac can already hear, while you are in the meeting and have started recording, and nothing more. A meeting you double-book, join nine minutes late, or send a colleague to in your place will not be covered.

This is the one honest reason to stay on Otter rather than the reason people usually cite, and it is worth being blunt about it rather than glossing over it the way a page trying to win the comparison would. If any meeting genuinely has to be captured whether or not a human remembers, that is a requirement, not a habit to fix, and no amount of discipline with a manual-start app closes that gap. Read the full comparison before committing if scheduled coverage is doing real work for you today.

Why there is no importer

Otter's transcript comes from audio its own agent joined and captured on its own service. Coii AudioNotes has never seen that audio and cannot manufacture the speaker turns, the timing or the confidence Otter's system produced them with — an importer that tried would be guessing at details the export genuinely does not preserve in a form this app could read. What actually works is keeping Otter's export as the historical archive and letting Coii AudioNotes start a fresh, independent one for meetings recorded from here.

The sequence that avoids losing anything

1. Export while the subscription is still active. Pull txt or docx for anything you need to read again, and mp3 for any recording where the exact audio might matter later — a client commitment, a quote you might need to verify, an interview.
2. Use bulk export if you're on Business rather than exporting one conversation at a time; on Pro or Basic, budget the time to go through conversations individually.
3. Store the export somewhere permanent, not a downloads folder that gets cleared, and confirmed against the number of conversations you expect.
4. Identify which meetings actually needed the scheduled agent — the ones you were not personally in, or joined late — because those are the ones Coii AudioNotes structurally cannot replace, and a plan for them (asking a colleague to record, or accepting the gap) belongs on this list before you cancel, not after.
5. Cancel Otter on your own timeline, once the export is verified.
6. Try Coii AudioNotes on a real meeting, not a test recording. Thirty days, every feature, no card, no account — the habit change is the actual thing being evaluated, not the transcription quality.

What a shared team account needs to plan for

A solo Otter subscription is a straightforward export-then-cancel. A team plan is not, because Otter's Business tier bundles administration, seat provisioning and centralised billing that a folder of exported files does not replace. Whoever administers the account should export before removing any seats, not after, since a removed seat's history becomes harder to reach depending on the account's own retention settings. It is also worth deciding, before anyone cancels anything, whether the team is actually replacing Otter with a single tool at all — Coii AudioNotes is licensed per person, up to three of their own Macs each, with no shared workspace, no admin console and nobody to provision or revoke. A five-person team moving off Otter buys five separate licences and keeps five separate archives, which is a real organisational change and not merely a subscription swap.

What changes day to day

The mechanical change is small: press record instead of trusting a schedule. The actual change is a mental one — a meeting is only captured if a human remembers to start it, which is a real regression for anyone who leaned on Otter's automatic coverage. For meetings you are always personally in, this costs nothing after the first week. For meetings you sometimes miss or send someone else to, it is a genuine loss worth naming rather than discovering.

What arrives in exchange is that nothing about a captured meeting depends on an account staying open or a service staying reachable. The transcript and the summary are written on the Mac, from a recording on the Mac, and they are files the moment they exist — not an export you have to remember to run before a renewal date decides for you.

What the first week actually looks like

The mechanical habit change lands fast — most people stop forgetting to press record within a handful of meetings, especially once it is mapped to a shortcut they already reach for. What takes longer to settle is trusting a summary that was written without an agent visibly present in the call the whole time. Otter's participant is a small, constant reminder that something is capturing the meeting; Coii AudioNotes gives you nothing to look at during the call itself, and checking the finished minutes against what you remember for the first several meetings is a reasonable way to build the same confidence back.

Podcasters and anyone who used Otter's srt export for captions will notice the biggest single gap here: there is no subtitle format on this side, because there is no video to caption in the first place. If timed captions are a deliverable rather than a nice-to-have, that workflow stays on whatever tool already produces it, and Coii AudioNotes only replaces the meeting-recording half of what Otter was doing.

The questions worth answering before you export

How many meetings genuinely need the scheduled agent, versus how many are just meetings you personally attend? For most people the honest count is small — a handful of recurring calls where being double-booked is routine, or one specific meeting series a team lead is not always free to join. Naming that short list before cancelling turns a vague worry about "losing coverage" into a concrete, solvable problem: ask whoever else is on those calls to record with their own copy of Coii AudioNotes, or accept that those specific meetings go uncaptured and plan around it.

Is the web archive itself the feature, or just where the transcripts happen to live? If reading old meetings from a browser on a machine that is not yours is something you actually do, that access disappears the day the subscription ends regardless of how good the export is — an exported docx file sits wherever you saved it, not in a browser tab you can reach from anywhere. If the browser access was never really used, this is a difference that only shows up on a spec sheet.

Does anyone downstream expect a transcript in Otter's format specifically? A workflow that pipes Otter's export into another tool, or a habit of pasting srt captions somewhere, is built around Otter's particular output shape. Nothing about Coii AudioNotes replicates that shape — it writes plain text and generates its own minutes — so a downstream process built on Otter's exact format needs to be re-pointed at whatever the new plain-text output looks like, which is a small task worth doing once rather than discovering broken midway through a busy week.

What this does not solve

If Otter's web archive, its phone app, or its ability to record a meeting you were not in are the reasons it got adopted, switching to Coii AudioNotes does not replace any of them — it runs on macOS 13 and later and nowhere else. This move only makes sense if the actual reason for leaving is that the audio, the transcript or the summary should not have been on a service in the first place: a client's confidential call, a candidate interview, anything under an NDA.

If that is the reason, download Coii AudioNotes once the Otter export is confirmed and saved, and start the trial on the next meeting you are actually in. For the ones an unattended agent used to cover, read what a meeting bot actually is and what recording without one looks like before deciding whether that gap is one you can live with, and see whether Otter trains on your recordings if that is part of why you are leaving. Other alternatives to Otter are worth a look too, in case a different tool closes the scheduling gap better than this one does.