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Meetings are often the bane of enterprise employees’ existence, but what if they didn’t have to be?
That’s the bold goal that Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of AI startup Otter AI, has set for his company. Otter is an AI-powered speech transcription service that has added a range of capabilities in recent years to enhance meetings, including integration with popular collaboration tools such as Zoom and Microsoft Outlook.
Liang has his Tesla drive him to the office every day with its autopilot feature — and he wants to provide Otter with the same type of autonomous capability to minimize some of the time spent in modern meetings.
To that end, Otter today announced the OtterPilot functionality. This will be able to automatically join meetings, annotate all the slides and then provide an accurate summary. OtterPilot extends Otter’s AI assistant capabilities introduced in 2022.
“I literally spend 60 to 80% of my time in meetings and I would like AI to make my meetings work better so it can reduce my stress,” Liang told VentureBeat. “That’s why we’re releasing OtterPilot to automate meetings. And this is just the beginning. We live in a very exciting era of AI breakthroughs.”
Lessons learned from 1 billion meetings
The market for AI-powered voice transcription and conferencing services is becoming increasingly competitive.
Earlier this month, Microsoft announced that it is integrating OpenAI-powered capabilities into Microsoft Teams Premium, including automatically generated meeting notes. Cisco and Google have also been actively rolling out AI features to help business users automate more meeting activities.
Partly due to the pandemic, the overall market for conferencing services and voice transcriptions has grown significantly. That question helped Otter hit a major milestone: 1 billion transcribed meetings.
As a result, Liang said, “we have a huge amount of meaty data.”
He emphasized that all meeting minutes transcribed so far help to inform and train Otter’s AI speech-to-text transcription model so that it can become increasingly accurate. He noted that the focus for Otter is on call data, which now enables both transcription and meeting summaries with OtterPilot.
Currently, Otter generates a summary of the meeting for the entire meeting, but in the near future Liang will also generate a summary for each speaker. So if a user missed a meeting, they can drill down to see a summary of what a specific speaker had to say.
The Future Otter: Sentiment Analysis and ChatGPT-Type Services?
The large number of meetings that Otter has transcribed will allow the company to offer even more opportunities in the future.
Liang explained that Otter has built his own AI models optimized for conversational data in meetings. In addition, Otter is building its own reinforcement learning system to help develop the accuracy of its existing model and enable new services, which may include sentiment analysis and even a ChatGPT-type chatbot for searching and responding to meeting data.
OtterPilot captures audio and slide presentations automatically. In the future, video may also be integrated, Liang said. This AI functionality can help read a person’s body language and facial expressions to better capture and understand what really happened during a meeting.
“The unique thing about the meeting space is that people talk to each other and there is a lot of interaction,” says Liang. “We want to learn how people react to each other.”
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