Transcription

You’ve seen Otter transcribe a work meeting and it was honestly impressive: speakers labeled, summary at the top, action items pulled out, all before you got back to your desk. Now it’s Sunday night, you’ve got four hours of session audio sitting in your downloads folder, and the thought arrives with the force of the obvious: why wouldn’t this work for D&D? Short answer: it will work, partially, and the partial part is sneaky. I build a competing tool, so read me with appropriate suspicion, but I’ll make the case the way I’d make it to a friend: here’s exactly what Otter does well at your table, here’s where it quietly hands the job back to you, and here’s how to tell which kind of group you’re in before you’ve burned a month finding out. ...

You’ve got the transcript. Maybe Craig recorded the session and a transcription tool turned it into text, maybe your VTT spat one out, maybe you typed it up like a Victorian clerk. Either way it’s Sunday night, there’s a wall of text on your screen, and the move is so obvious it barely counts as an idea: paste it into ChatGPT and say “summarize this D&D session.” And it works. Let me say that clearly before I say anything else, because I build a paid tool that lives one shelf over from this workflow and you should know my angle. Paste one session into a chatbot and ask for a recap, and you will get a decent recap. Ask it who took the deal with the smuggler, and it will usually tell you. For one session, in one window, on one Sunday, the free DIY version genuinely delivers. If your campaign were one session long, I’d have nothing to sell you. ...