Otter.ai launched Meeting GenAI, a set of tools aimed that mine meetings across multiple platforms to create insights.
The announcement is notable for a few reasons. First, Otter.ai Meeting GenAI can work across multiple collaboration silos such as Microsoft Teams, Google Workspace and Zoom. In addition, Otter.ai's Meeting GenAI play could be a way for enterprises to gauge meeting zeitgeist and form knowledge repositories based on meeting notes and summaries.
The company said Meeting GenAI will be included in its plans ranging from the free Otter Basic plan to the $20 a month per user Otter Business plan.
Meeting GenAI from Otter.ai includes:
- Otter AI Chat across all meetings with the ability to get answers and generate emails and status updates. The big idea behind Meeting GenAI is that it can focus on multiple meetings and leverage past meetings to collect insights from multiple platforms. Otter.ai added that Meeting GenAI will be able to answer questions like what was missed while on vacations. Users will be able to ask questions, generate content and get insights.
- AI Chat in Channels, which will give the ability to chat between Otter AI Chat and team members for alignment. With AI Chat in Channels, Otter.ai is looking to make its assistant a team collaboration tool.
- AI Conversation Summary View, which will identify action items in real time and deliver a narrative summary. The goal with this tool is to eliminate post-meeting confusion while ensuring accountability.
My take
Being able to summarize and transcribe meeting across the enterprise and multiple platforms is a savvy move by Otter.ai because it leans into its biggest advantage—it's vendor and platform agnostic. Tech vendors—and many enterprises—want collaboration on one stack such as Zoom, Google Meet and Teams/Microsoft 365, but the reality is that workers use multiple platforms. The other reality is that we're already overtaxed on meeting so anything I can do to get a cross platform digital twin comes in handy.
I also am an Otter.ai subscriber and it is useful when you have to be in two places at once or two conference calls at same time.
What remains to be seen is whether Otter.ai can convince enterprises that the cross-platform recordings, transcriptions and summaries are worth it. Enterprises are about to become tired of copilot add-ons, costs and overall sprawl. Otter.ai will have to demonstrate returns outside being part of a bundle, but its move to include Meeting GenAI in existing plans is a nice start.
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I will say that some high-level dashboard of all meetings, a word cloud and quick summary could give CEOs and CXOs a quick view of what's happening. The benefits of the new Otter.ai features are also obvious to individual workers. Makes me wonder if we'll all start bringing our own copilots to work.