Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang is not pleased that the company is being viewed and used as a mere meeting note taker. Liang wants Otter.ai to be the company’s go-to source, and a batch of new products released on Tuesday is the first step in its evolution.
On Tuesday, the Silicon Valley-based AI Conference Assistant Startup released a new suite of tools for businesses designed to properly incorporate data from conferences into other workflows by focusing that information on a central knowledge base. The aim is to grow the otter business by helping businesses get more encounters from recorded meetings.
Otter’s new product suite includes APIs that allow users to create custom integrations with platforms such as MCP servers that connect their Otter data to external AI models, as well as new AI agents that allow users to search for company meeting notes and presentations.
Lean told TechCrunch that it was the next stage in an otter’s life.
“We’re evolving from meeting note takers to corporate meeting knowledge bases,” Leanne said. “This is a systematic record of conversation. It helps businesses to expand their growth and promote measurable business value.”
When Otter was founded in 2016, there were only a handful of people who met transcription companies. I’ve made a much better leap from today. The AI boom kicked off in 2022 has driven a surge in startups like Granola and Circleback. Even older players like Firefly have seen a surge in interest.
Liang argues that this transition will cause otters to enter a different division than their previous peers.
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A meeting is where most of the company’s knowledge is stored, whether it is a note from a customer sales call or a discussion about marketing strategies. However, without a central location for these meeting notes, that information can help businesses a lot.
“In many cases, information silos create inefficiencies,” Liang said. “One team doesn’t know what the other teams are doing and think it was planned like a month ago. Not everyone gets notified in many cases. So the idea is to create a permission system and know that most of the (non-nonconventional) information is shared as much as possible.”
Not all meetings with Otter are added directly to this company-wide knowledge base, and users can choose to restrict meeting memo access for recordings that handle sensitive information.
Despite access controls, employee and information privacy remains a concern. Even if the meeting is on a neutral topic, otter transcriptions choose small talk and chatter that occur before and after the meeting.
Otter is also the subject of an August class action lawsuit that claims that the company records private conversations to record personal conversations without user consent and use that information to train transcription services.
Liang cannot comment specifically on the lawsuit, but this is not a problem inherent to otters, and seeing a larger picture means that increased access to information is better.
“If they blame us, they could blame everyone else. “In my view, we are on the right side of history. We are building this new AI revolution. If we want to help AI, we need to put AI in a meeting.”
