What they do well — and where it stops
Otter is genuinely good at meetings
Otter.ai is best-in-class for meeting transcription — its bot joins Zoom, Meet and Teams calls and produces searchable, attributed transcripts at scale.
But Otter is meeting transcription, not live dictation, and the August 2025 Brewer class action (recording-without-consent allegations) plus a US legal entity + 17 US subprocessors mean it's a hard sell for any German lawyer or doctor under § 203 StGB. Sprecho is the live-dictation tool that types into your active app — different category, fundamentally different privacy posture.
At a glance
| Sprecho | Otter.ai | |
|---|---|---|
| Price (monthly) | €12.99 brutto incl. VAT | $16.99 USD (~€15.70) |
| Free tier | Yes · 2,000 words/week | Yes |
| Platforms | Windows · macOS · Linux · iOS · Android | Windows · macOS · iOS · Android |
| EU hosting | Hetzner Falkenstein, Germany | No |
| German-language UI | Yes — native | English-only |
| AVV / DPA | Yes, public template | Not public |
Pricing for B2B buyers — netto, like-for-like
Otter invoices from Delaware (US Inc.) in USD under the reverse-charge mechanism for B2B — no VAT on the invoice. Sprecho invoices come from Melo Designer GmbH in EUR brutto; the 19 % VAT is recoverable as Vorsteuer. Net-for-net comparison below.
Sprecho Pro
VAT included & deductibleMonthly billing
€10.92 / mo netto
(€12.99 brutto incl. 19 % VAT)
Yearly billing · 15 % cheaper
€9.24 / mo netto
(€10.99 brutto · €131.88 brutto/yr · €110.82 netto/yr)
Otter Pro
Reverse-charge invoice (B2B)Monthly billing
$16.99 USD / mo
Delaware Inc. · meeting transcription, not in-app dictation
Yearly billing · 15 % cheaper
$8.33 USD / mo ($99.96 / yr)
Invoiced from US · 17 US-based subprocessors
Hidden costs / hidden risks
- August 2025 Brewer v. Otter.ai class action — recording without consent allegations
- All 17 subprocessors US-based — full CLOUD Act + Schrems II exposure
- Bot in your call records the whole conversation — different consent profile from screen dictation
- German is officially 'in beta' per Otter's own docs
Where your data actually lives
Named legal entities, named regions, named subprocessors. The single most concrete answer to: where does my audio go?
Sprecho
Melo Designer GmbH (Lower Saxony, Germany)
Hetzner Falkenstein / Nuremberg (Germany)
Otter.ai
Otter.ai Inc. (Delaware, USA · HQ Mountain View, CA)
AWS us-east-1 (Virginia, USA)
What each side built that the other didn't
Different categories — Otter is a meeting bot, Sprecho is live in-app dictation. The feature lists barely overlap.
What Otter.ai built that Sprecho didn't
- Zoom / Meet / Teams meeting bot that joins your calls and transcribes them end-to-end with speaker labels.
- AI summarisation of multi-hour meetings into action items and key moments.
- Public subprocessor list with all 17 entries enumerated — Otter does subprocessor transparency better than most.
- 300-minutes/month free tier for meeting transcription.
What Sprecho built that Otter.ai didn't
- Live in-app dictation — text appears in your active app as you speak, not in a separate meeting transcript document.
- EU-only data residency on Hetzner Germany — Otter runs on AWS us-east-1 with 17 US-based subprocessors and full CLOUD Act exposure.
- No recording-consent class action — the August 2025 Brewer suit alleging Otter records without consent has no Sprecho equivalent because Sprecho doesn't record meetings.
- German Fachsprache vocabulary trained for DATEV, RA-MICRO and Medistar — Otter's German is officially "in beta" per their own docs.
Honest feature comparison
Otter and Sprecho overlap on transcription, not on dictation flow. We show every row honestly — and where the categories differ, we say so.
Platform support
Privacy & DSGVO
German language quality
Pricing
Dictation features
Switch in three steps
Different category — most teams keep both, or pick one. If you only need live dictation, Sprecho replaces Otter outright.
Download Sprecho
Win / Mac / Linux installer from sprecho.ai — 30 seconds.
Bring your vocabulary
If you used Otter for live dictation specifically (rare), there's no vocabulary export — re-enter custom terms in Sprecho Settings.
Re-map your shortcut
Default shortcut is Fn + Option. Configure to your preference — 10 seconds in Settings.
A 12-person Berlin law firm migrated in under an hour, including dictionary import.
“Otter for meetings, Sprecho for in-app dictation — until we started worrying about who has those meeting recordings. Now we dictate notes manually and use Otter only for client-okayed external calls.”