AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai wants to make it even easier for its business users to record their meetings. Today, the company introduces Otter Assistant, a new feature that allows you to automatically join the Zoom meetings on your calendar, transcribe the conversations, and share the notes with other attendees. Although Otter.ai is already built into Zoom, the wizard has been designed so that using transcription is something you don’t have to keep reminding yourself to activate at the start or end of the meeting, while also serving as a place , where attendees can work together, ask questions, share photos, and more while the meeting is in progress.
The feature also bypasses the previous limitation with Zoom where only the meeting leader can use the Otter.ai integration directly.
The idea of automating the transcription of meetings makes sense for the remote work environment caused by the pandemic, where people have split their time between work, parenting, homeschooling, and other duties. Often times, this can result in meetings where users get dragged away and miss things that have been said. Otter.ai can help in this area. However, it can also be helpful for problems such as overlapping meetings or larger meetings where only a few topics are directly relevant to your work. However, you want to be able to review the rest of the meeting discussion later rather than in real life. Time.
To use the new Otter Assistant, users first synchronize their Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar with the Otter service. For the sake of transparency, the assistant will then automatically take part in all future Zoom meetings in which it will appear as an additional meeting participant.
The wizard also publishes a transcription link in the Zoom chat that anyone can access. In other words, this isn’t a meeting skip feature without your boss knowing. It’s designed for times when everyone has already agreed that the meeting will be transcribed.
During the meeting, attendees can use Otter’s live log to highlight important parts, add photos, and take notes. You can also use the comments feature to ask questions instead of commenting. This can be useful if you are in a noisy place at the time of the meeting.
Once the assistant is activated, you no longer have to remember to turn Otter.ai on for each meeting, and you can even use your headphones to listen to the ongoing meeting. The Otter Assistant can still record both sides of the conversation.
However, you can turn off the Otter Assistant on a per-meeting basis from the My Agenda section on the Otter website, which has new buttons next to each scheduled meeting.
When meetings are over, you can also configure Otter.ai to automatically share the meeting notes with all attendees.
The Otter Assistant is available to Otter.ai Business users. These are updated plans that start at $ 20 per month and include features like two-factor authentication, SOC2 compliance, advanced search, export, custom vocabulary, shared speaker identification, centralized data and functionality, billing and more.
To date, Otter.ai has transcribed over 150 million sessions, up from 100 million at the beginning of 2021. The company does not disclose details of its total subscriber base, but has previously noted that sales increased eight-fold in 2020, which resulted in its $ 50 million Series B, announced in February.