Users of the meeting transcription tool Otter will soon have access to an AI-powered assistant that can answer questions about the content of their meetings.
Otter’s OtterPilot tool, unveiled earlier this year, can already join meetings on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, where it records and transcribes the conversation and syncs the transcript to images of presentation slides, while a recent feature also automatically generates a bullet-point summary of the discussion.
And the new Otter AI Chat feature, presently rolling out to users, will enable meeting participants to talk to the AI assistant through a text chat box. There, they can ask questions about what’s been discussed or enlist the AI to perform meeting-related tasks, like drafting a follow-up email to other participants or a blog post based on the discussion. The conversation tool is available to invited participants both after the meeting concludes and while it’s still in progress, which Otter cofounder and CEO Sam Laing says can be especially helpful to latecomers.
“They join the meeting, let’s say, 20 minutes late,” he says. “They may ask, any action items for me so far?”
The tool uses a mix of AI models Otter developed internally and external ones, Liang says, declining to go into more specifics. While the chat interface itself is similar to other generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Otter has particular expertise—and training data—for building AI systems designed to parse conversational speech, as opposed to the written speech mostly used to train other generative AI systems, he says.
“Conversations have their unique characteristics in a sense that people talk in a different style than writing,” he says. “It’s more casual, and there are also multiple speakers involved in any conversation.”
At present, participants talk to Otter AI Chat in a shared chat box, but Liang says the company is likely to enable one-on-one chats with the bot in the future, which will likely be helpful for personal tasks like writing follow-up emails. Paid Otter users will currently have unlimited use of the AI, with free users getting access with “some limitation,” though plans may change in the future based on how it’s used and feedback Otter gets.
The AI system also currently only has access to information from the current meeting, but Liang says the company is working on ways to let it access information from previous meetings while preserving confidentiality. That would enable people to access context based on previous meetings, perhaps of the same group, without risking the bot divulging sensitive information from another conversation with other people.
Liang says the AI system, coupled with Otter’s existing transcripts and summaries, may even enable some people to attend fewer meetings, since they’ll be able to quickly review what went on after the fact. He already uses the system to understand customer requests and other details from sales calls he doesn’t personally join, he says.
“So if we can save some time for each person, let’s say one hour, one less meeting you have to go through in real time,” he says, “you can use that one hour to do something else that’s more productive.”
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