Otter AI Knows What You Missed On Boring Business Calls

Struggling to drum up the enthusiasm for your fifth video meeting of the day? A new AI assistant is making it easier than ever to skip business meetings and catch up on what you missed.

Otter has long provided automatic transcriptions of meetings you’ve attended. Now, the company’s new Meeting GenAI will bring you up to speed on calls you weren’t even on.

The service allows companies to create public meeting channels, where anyone within the company can review meetings that have taken place. Otter’s AI assistant will not only provide a concise summary of the meeting, complete with a checklist of action points, it also allows non-attendees to ask questions about what was said in the meeting.

For example, the AI assistant might be asked to “tell me what was said about the marketing plan for the New York store launch” and it will scan meeting conversations to deliver the answers. Relevant parts of the conversation are highlighted, so that non-attendees can go back and listen to precisely what was said.

The AI’s ability to answer questions is not confined to a single meeting, but any meetings held in the public space. The AI effectively becomes a company knowledge base, able to answer questions on anything that’s been discussed.

“I found I’m able to ask questions, like ‘what’s the status of this project?’ and it’ll pull from many meetings and give me an up to date, in the last hour status of that project,” said Darius Contractor, chief growth officer at Otter.

“It might not be perfect every time, but it’s so much faster than asking your co-workers and it’s accurate enough. It’s incredibly valuable.”

Bossing Meetings

Although the Meeting GenAI could prove handy for employees who’ve missed a call, its real value lies in keeping everyone in the company abreast of developments, according to Contractor, particularly managers who don’t have time to sit in on every call.

“It really cuts down on silos,” said Contractor. “You can share a meeting and get everyone in your company to see what’s happened in that meeting. And then if they want an update, they can just go to that [Otter] channel and read through what happened in that meeting most recently, instead of bugging you for the update.”

“For instance, you often have local meetings within pods or teams every week, and those ladder up to a leadership meeting later that same week,” Contractor added. “That’s at least how it works in Otter. Before that leadership meeting, we can say ‘for the standing agenda for the leadership meeting, gather all the updates across meetings for the week for this meeting.’ And so we can effectively generate the agenda for that meeting.”

Otter claims this level of AI integration goes well beyond what other services such as Microsoft Teams or Slack offer, where AI assistants are generally confined to single meetings or users, rather than working across the entire company’s meetings.

Contractor also believes the service is preferable to alternative company knowledge base tools, such as wikis or document shares. “We know that you can talk faster than you can type, and you can actually read faster than you can listen,” he said.

“It’s a much more efficient way of communicating than typing everything down and into a doc or having everything be live synchronous communication. We think we can make organizations more effective communicators and have less internal silos through the use of AI.”