Otter.ai has made a name for itself as a smart, AI-powered transcription service, but as this type of automated transcription becomes more common, the company is broadening its mandate, adding a number of featuresincluding meeting summaries generated by artificial intelligence, with the goal of transform users’ Otter.ai accounts into collaborative hubs for work.
The goal is to make Otter.ai bigger than transcripts and satisfy the company’s growing number of corporate clients.
“A year ago, most of the [nostri clienti] they were individuals, but more and more professionals are using it. The new Otter makes it a point of reference for all meeting content and collaboration needs. “
said the Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang in an interview.
When they log into accounts on the web, Otter.ai users will now see a “home feed” that brings together transcripts and a calendar of upcoming meetings into a single overview, plus they will be able to join meetings directly from their calendar and use integrations from Otter with services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams And Google Meet to record and transcribe audio.
Transcripts can then be added in a variety of ways, with the big news being AI-generated meeting summaries, which should highlight the highlights of the recordings.
There is also something that Otter calls “meeting gems”, these are parts of the transcript that have been highlighted by users, who can then tag colleagues and add comments or activities; users can now too add screenshots to transcripts with a single click, making it easier to refer to visual material discussed during meetings.
The most intriguing feature, however, are the AI-generated meeting summaries, which while there are no official tests yet, Liang admitted the tool was “far from perfect, but it’s a great start.”
But how does Otter.ai work? And why is it so important?
The company’s software examines many different factors to decide which are the most relevant points of a meeting:
“Let’s look at the words of the argument that people use. Let’s examine the dynamics of the speakers: who is speaking and what topics they are discussing […] and when they changed the subject. It is never based only on a signal, it is always a combination “
Liang says.
In a’software preview that you can see synthetically directly on the company websitethe tool seemed to detect when new conversation topics were introduced and changed the speaker.
It could potentially be a useful way to skip the relevant parts of a meetingbut machine learning is very unlikely to match the knowledge of a human, who would know much more about the background and context of a meeting and its attendees.
In addition to summaries, Otter.ai also offers an analysis of who spends the most time in a meeting talking, a tool that could be useful when trying to balance team collaboration. Liang says there is also a lot more analysis that could be done (such as sentiment analysis on the language used) that would allow Otter.ai to expand far beyond its current space.
“This is why I say Otter potentially has a larger total addressable market than Zoom or other conferencing systems. Conference systems only provide a way to talk to each other; they don’t really understand what they’re discussing. “
Liang himself says.
However, other startups are already moving fast in this space, for example one called Poised promises to educate users on their presentation skills by transcribing meetings and analyzing things like their use of filler words and speed of expression, while another called Sembly offers similar AI-generated meeting summaries.
For Otter.ai, however, the biggest threat is giants like Google and Microsoftwhose AI expertise would allow them to quickly create such capabilities themselves and offer them to a much wider audience, and indeed, they are already ahead.
Examples include PowerPoint from Microsoftwhich offers its own voice analysis and tips for speakers, and Google Docswhich uses AI to generate summaries and content pages, however when asked about this threat, Liang claims that Otter will be successful for the reason why so many startups do it: it focuses on a single product while the tech giants are distracted by their sprawling interests.
When asked how obsessed he is, his answer is superb:
“Eric Yuan, the CEO of Zoom, is, I bet, a lot more obsessed with video quality than the CEO of Google. Google CEO earns 99% of his money from Search and YouTube, so nothing else matters ”.
For Otter, he says, that obsession is turning meeting transcripts into action plans.
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