Otter is introducing a meeting-oriented AI chatbot

Automatic transcription service Otter announced a new AI-powered chatbot today that will let participants ask questions during and after a meeting and help them collaborate with teammates.

Otter AI Chat will help you catch up to the meeting if you ask “I’m late to the meeting! What did I miss?” or generate a follow-up email with action points after the meeting is finished. The new chatbot helps users get contextual answers based on what was discussed in the meeting.

In March, Zoom announced a similar feature for its users to provide meeting summaries in case they are late.

The company said that Otter’s bot can provide answers to multiple people — unlike bots like ChatGPT, which focus on 1:1 conversations. Teammates can also tag each other for clarification or action items. Until now, Otter let you do that through comments on the transcript.

Otter mentioned that it is transcribing over 1 million spoken words every minute. But it didn’t specify if the Otter AI Chat was trained on that data.

The company said that the Otter AI Chat feature will be rolled out to all users in the coming days. Otter added that AI chat data won’t be shared with third parties.

In February, the company launched the OtterPilot bot that automatically emailed meeting summaries to participants. The bot also inserts images of important slides in the meeting notes and transcription. With the launch of Otter AI Chat, the company is trying to provide an intelligence layer on top of the existing AI-powered notetaking feature to let users ask complex questions.

AI-generated meeting notes and summaries in different formats have been a fairly common feature in meeting-related tools due to the recent progress of different Large Language Models (LLMs). Meeting companies are trying to provide even more value with chatbots that can provide insights by leveraging meeting data.