Otter.ai Launches Enterprise Search as AI Meeting Notetakers Pivot to Full Workspace Platforms
Company acts as MCP client to pull data from Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce, aiming to justify business valuations beyond transcription
En resumen
- Otter.ai has launched enterprise search capabilities, transforming its AI meeting notetaker into a full workspace platform.
- The company now acts as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, allowing users to connect Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query data across these tools alongside meeting data.
- Otter's CEO Sam Liang noted that enterprise customers prefer bot-based meeting capture for transparency.
Resumen generado por IA
AI meeting notetaker Otter.ai is getting serious about enterprise. The company, which has been around for nearly a decade, announced that it is launching enterprise search capabilities, effectively turning its product into a workspace where users can bring in data from different sources, search across all of it, and make decisions about their business.
The company is acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client, which means it can connect to and pull data from outside apps and services using a common standard that AI tools are rapidly adopting. With this launch, users can connect their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query that data along with existing meeting data. The company said that it will soon allow connections with Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Slack.
"When we talk to enterprise customers, most of them actually prefer the note taker that joins the Zoom meeting because it provides the transparency. They also prefer the meeting notes to be shared with all the meeting attendees, so that the note is not limited to one person," Otter CEO Sam Liang told TechCrunch over a call.
Users can not only search for data across these tools but can also push meeting summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message. The company said that it has also redesigned its AI assistant to be consistently present across the whole interface, so users can ask questions anytime. The assistant can understand the context of the screen, such as a particular meeting or a channel, and answer questions accordingly.
Meanwhile, most notetakers are following Granola's lead and allowing for a botless meeting capture — recording meetings using a device's system audio rather than having a bot join the call. Otter said that it brought this feature to the Mac app late last year, and is now launching a Windows app with a similar feature.
Otter said that it has a deduplication feature that prevents a swarm of bots from joining a meeting simultaneously to avoid situations where there are more bots than humans on a call.
