The popular automatic transcription firm Otter.ai launched an AI chatbot that is set to cater to professional and corporate niches in the market. While Otter.ai has been a known player in the audio-to-text transcription sector for providing its users with AI-enabled note-taking tools, the firm’s latest offering—Otter Pilot—comes as an added benefit to its existing capabilities. The advancement in language models and natural language processing have enabled better audio transcribers and bots; however, Otter.ai goes a step further in providing users with an AI chatbot that can answer questions about their meetings and even prepare insights from recorded conversations. A unique take on the generative AI tech that has recently garnered popularity, Otter.ai seeks to reduce the amount of work spent in streamlining tasks and noting down important insights from key meetings and conversations. Otter.ai’s services are currently targeted at professionals, corporates, large firms, and even individual users.
The firm’s existing tools already integrate into key software and work-related tools such as Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Sheets, Microsoft Office, and Outlook. Otter.ai’s chatbot will log in to meetings along with users to keep track of key details being discussed in the meeting. Users can also use the chatbot and Otter.ai’s other tools to transcribe information from recorded meetings, calls, podcasts, and more. While language model chatbots like ChatGPT have been serving individual users and corporate clients for several purposes, firms like Otter.ai have cashed in on the AI boom to provide highly pointed services to a defined set of users.
Otter Pilot: Bringing Intelligent Chatbots to AI Transcription
The recently released Otter Pilot chatbot allows users to keep track of meeting-related information in real time.
Otter.ai has grown to become a leading brand in the audio-to-text transcription industry. By leveraging the power of machine learning, the company has grown its capabilities, and processes over a million spoken words every minute on average. Competition, however, is steadily growing. Microsoft recently linked ChatGPT to Bing alongside its in-house copilots offered on MS Office and other platforms. Regardless, Otter.ai continues to be a widespread favorite. Unlike conventional AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude, Otter Pilot is structured very differently. The former set of chatbots is primarily crafted to converse with a single individual in a given chat. On the other hand, Otter Pilot is capable of registering and responding to multiple conversations from different users. This unique approach was taken to allow the AI transcription chatbot to join the meeting as a participant. Otter.ai’s chatbot is based on three key functions: it serves to facilitate collaboration between different participants in a meeting, answer related questions, and generate highly specific content based on the meeting’s agendas. Going beyond mere audio-to-text transcription—unlike Otter.ai’s other tools—Otter Pilot serves to be an all-round productivity assistant to its users.
While the firm’s other tools are capable of providing briefings and an AI-generated summary of meetings, the chatbot helps users interact with it even in real time and offers detailed responses to users even if the conversations are ongoing. The multimodal interaction platform facilitates conversations between fellow members in the meeting and also allows them to clarify common questions and points of concern with Otter Pilot. With an amalgamation of an intelligent chatbot and pointed transcription, users can always be sure of key details in meetings like dates, times, numbers, and other relevant specifics that apply to their topics of discussion. As competition grows in the generic AI space, AI-centric productivity tools have a big impact on the industry, given that people are now more prone to use AI tools in the workplace than ever before.
What Can Otter.ai’s Chatbot Achieve?
Otter Pilot offers several features that cannot be found in any of the traditional chatbot interfaces or productivity tools.
Otter Pilot is more than the average chatbot that responds with the most relevant information found in its data set. Apart from communicating with meeting participants, the chatbot also offers a variety of tools for its users. Some of these are delineated below.
- Generating Action Items: Otter.ai’s chatbot can produce a range of AI-generated content relevant to the meetings it attends. Apart from to-do lists and email summaries, Otter Pilot also creates blog posts and task-related follow-up emails that can be sent to fellow participants. The intelligent model works to prepare content surrounding the details discussed in the meeting or conversation.
- Automated Notes: Building upon the company’s previous experience with audio-to-text transcription, Otter.ai’s chatbot allows users to continue generating important text snippets with information from their meetings. Users can edit these notes and summaries in real time, making changes and additions as the bot continues to transcribe from the ongoing conversations.
- Slide Capture: Otter Pilot automates the process of capturing images and slides from the meeting, saving users’ time in doing so. This also allows the attendees to remain focused on their meetings instead of keeping track of the slides being presented and their subsequent captures.
- Meeting Broadcasts: Following conversations or meetings, the AI chatbot will automatically send an email with all the information discussed in the meeting via easily consumable notes and summaries. The bot can also be programmed to provide these to a group on the Otter platform instead. This feature allows firms to avoid spending too much time on drafting and sending out important meeting summaries.
The Scope of Otter.ai’s Tools
Productivity-oriented AI tools like Otter Pilot have the potential to aid even academic note-taking and other pursuits.
Otter Pilot integrates Otter’s older offerings with its ingenious speech-based language model. By making note-taking and meeting summaries an automated task, the tool simplifies summarizing discussions and highlights key points of discussion. Unlike written communication, conversational dynamics are more nuanced, and a lot of information is conveyed within a short span. Tools like Otter Pilot can streamline the process of drawing key bits of information from speech and present it in a consumable format. While this has key implications for professionals and corporations, it also has the potential to become a useful tool for students and academics trying to pick up points from lectures and classes. As students are increasingly taking to AI writing, introducing productivity-oriented AI tools for students might just benefit them while also not posing any significant threat to academic integrity. Though Otter Pilot is not great at adapting to large spaces with background noise, if fine-tuned, it might just turn into the go-to note-taking tool even for students in colleges and universities.
FAQs
1. What is Otter Pilot used for?
Otter Pilot integrates with Otter.ai’s existing AI-backed transcription services for meetings, webinars, podcasts, and more. The AI chatbot tracks conversations in real time and is also capable of answering questions pertaining to the details being discussed. Otter Pilot provides users with an approachable in-meeting AI assistant.
2. Is Otter.ai free to use?
Otter.ai has multiple subscription tiers for its users. The platform’s Basic plan caters to users just getting started on the service and is free of cost. It allows users 300 transcription minutes a month with a limit of 30 minutes per conversation. The second tier titled “Basic+” costs $8.33 and comes with 1200 transcription minutes a month and allows up to 90 minutes of transcription per conversation. Lastly, the Business tier offers 6000 monthly transcription minutes with over 4 hours of transcription per meeting. There also exists a large enterprise-level tier that requires interested users to contact Otter.ai’s sales department.
3. Can I use Otter.ai offline?
Currently, there exist no offline methods to use Otter.ai’s services. All of Otter.ai’s services including the latest Otter Pilot chatbot require a WiFi or cellular data connection to function.