Add Otter to Zoom: Set Up Meeting Notes and Follow-Up

Otter.ai joins your Zoom meetings as an automated participant, transcribes the conversation in real time, and produces a summary with highlighted action items afterward. The transcript and summary live in your Otter account; from there you can review, edit, and share them with meeting participants. Tools like fenbs complement this by keeping the decisions and follow-up tasks that a person has confirmed from the transcript in a shared record that any connected AI can read before the next session.

Set up the Otter and Zoom connection

There are two ways to connect Otter to Zoom: through the Zoom App Marketplace, or by linking your calendar so Otter's bot joins scheduled Zoom meetings automatically.

1. Sign in to your Otter account at otter.ai and open Settings > Integrations.
2. Find the Zoom integration and click Connect. You will be redirected to Zoom to authorize the connection and grant Otter permission to join your meetings.
3. Alternatively, connect your Google Calendar or Outlook calendar in the same Settings area. Otter reads your upcoming calendar events, detects Zoom links, and joins those meetings automatically.
4. For calendar-based joining, confirm the setting for automatic joining: you can set it to join all meetings, meetings you own, or only meetings where you choose to enable it.
5. Test the connection by scheduling a short Zoom meeting with yourself and confirming that Otter's bot appears as a participant.

If the Otter bot does not appear in your test meeting, check the Zoom settings for your account or the Zoom room. Some Zoom accounts require the host to admit participants from the waiting room, and the Otter bot will wait there like any external participant. Also confirm that Otter's calendar integration can read the Zoom link from the meeting invite.

Recording settings and participant consent

Before using Otter in meetings with other people, confirm that all participants know they are being transcribed. This is both a legal requirement in many US states under two-party consent laws and a professional courtesy. Otter's bot joins visibly as a named participant, which gives notice, but your organization may require an explicit verbal or written disclosure at the start of each meeting.

If you are in a Zoom meeting hosted by someone else's organization, their recording policies apply. Some organizations prohibit third-party transcription services. Check with the meeting host if you are unsure.

Review the transcript and summary

After the meeting, Otter sends you an email with the transcript and summary. Open the meeting in the Otter app to review the full transcript and correct speaker labels if the auto-assignment was wrong. The summary section highlights key moments, action items, and topics discussed. Check these carefully: transcription accuracy varies with audio quality, accents, and technical vocabulary.

Otter's action item detection is a starting point, not a final list. Items that were discussed but not explicitly stated as actions may be missed, and items that sound like commitments but are not may be included. A human review of the list before sending it to the team is worthwhile, especially for important decisions.

Move confirmed decisions and tasks into a lasting record

Otter keeps transcripts inside its own app. If the people in the meeting use different tools, or if you want the decisions to be available to an AI assistant in a later session, you need to move the confirmed items somewhere that persists outside Otter. A decision noted in a transcript is not the same as a decision recorded with the person who made it, the reason behind it, and the project it applies to.

For connecting an AI assistant directly to Zoom meeting data through MCP, see Zoom MCP. That covers a different integration path where an AI can query meeting metadata and recordings rather than joining as a participant.

How to do this with fenbs

1. Create a free account and add a project for the team or initiative the meeting is about.
2. After each meeting, review the Otter summary and identify the items that represent confirmed decisions and assigned tasks.
3. Add confirmed decisions to Decisions and rules in fenbs, with the person who made each decision and the reason if it was stated.
4. Add action items as tasks on the kanban board, assign them to the right person, and write the next step.
5. Before the next meeting on the same topic, connect a supported AI assistant from Integrations and ask it to read the project context so it can brief you on what was decided last time.

fenbs does not connect to Otter or import meeting transcripts automatically. It keeps the decisions and tasks that a person has reviewed and confirmed, in a record that any connected AI can read. The step of reviewing the Otter transcript and choosing what to record in fenbs is a deliberate human action.

This deliberate step matters. A transcript records everything said; a decision record should only contain what was agreed. Keeping the two separate prevents an AI session from treating a casual suggestion made in a meeting as a confirmed rule.