Otter.ai adds transcription archiving and recall across the enterprise

Otter.ai, the real-time notetaking service, is seeking to shake up the enterprise transcription market with its new Meeting GenAI feature, which can capture, access, and immediately provide information from meetings across an organization.

Meeting GenAI will be able to recall notes from another video conference, phone call, or in-person meeting from weeks earlier, for someone who wasn’t able to attend or who doesn’t remember what happened. This capability will work for a person sitting at her desk or for a group of people in a teleconference or in-person meeting.

So, for example, an enterprise’s product marketing team is on a video conference and wants to know the latest specs for a new feature discussed during an engineering team meeting two days earlier. The director of product marketing can ask Otter.ai to describe the new feature, as discussed in the previous meeting, or to summarize the engineering team’s discussion.

Another use case would be employees returning from a week’s vacation asking Otter.ai for a summary of all the meetings they missed.

Meeting GenAI makes AI chat “10 times more powerful by allowing you to query your entire meeting database,” said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai. “As a founder and CEO of a startup, I have 20, 30, sometimes almost 40 meetings a week,” he said. “Oftentimes, I’m double booked.”

But with GenAI’s meeting sharing platform, Liang can search for meetings he’s missed or have the tool summarize one of the many meetings he attended to jog his memory.

A transcription and notetaking service that can save, archive, and recall all meetings, including in-person meetings, phone conversations, and video calls, is a huge step forward in a marketplace dominated by large companies with AI tools that can transcribe one meeting at a time, with no way to connect them, Liang said.

With Meeting GenAI, Otter.ai aims to offer a more full-featured alternative to transcription tools from huge players in the space, including Microsoft, Google, and Zoom, Liang added. “As a startup, your biggest weapon is actually to move fast and innovate fast,” he said.  “We can be more innovative; we can take a risk.”

Platform agnostic

Another advantage for Otter.ai over the big boys is that it’s platform agnostic, Liang added. Otter.ai works with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, he said.

Beyond the ability to recall and summarize all meetings, the new Meeting GenAI also works in enterprise chat services such as Slack, giving chat participants the same ability to ask for meeting or chat summaries. Otter.ai has applied for a patent for collaborative AI chat capabilities.

This new AI Chat in Channels feature unites meeting information with asynchronous communication by enabling team members to chat with each other and with Otter AI Chat and generate answers from earlier channel discussions related to topics of interest.

These new features give Otter.ai an advantage over competitors, said Larry Dignan, editor in chief of Constellation Insights at Constellation Research. “Being able to summarize and transcribe meetings across the enterprise and multiple platforms is a savvy move by Otter.ai because it leans into its biggest advantage: it’s vendor and platform agnostic,” he said. “Tech vendors—and many enterprises—want collaboration on one stack… but the reality is that workers use multiple platforms.”

Many employees already feel they have too many meetings, and cross-platform digital twin features can alleviate some of that meeting anxiety, he added.

It’s unknown, however, whether the new features will gain traction in the market, Dignan added. “Enterprises are about to become tired of copilot add-ons, costs and overall sprawl,” he said. However, “the benefits of the new Otter.ai features are obvious to individual workers—it makes me wonder if we’ll all start bringing our own copilots to work.”

Breaking down silos

Going forward, the Meeting GenAI chatbot will be able to volunteer information on a chat channel after observing a conversation and assessing that it has data to offer, Liang said.

Meeting GenAI will enable enterprises to be more transparent across divisions and break down information silos, Liang said. “It’s actually beneficial to make the most of meetings open to your employees, so that your engineering team knows what the sales team is doing,” he said. “Information exchange and communication is super important for an enterprise to function efficiently. We’re trying to solve that problem.”

Otter.ai offers all the new AI features across its plans, including the free Otter Basic plan and the $20 per month per user Otter Business plan.