Otter.ai

Otter.ai is an AI-powered transcription and meeting assistant developed by AISense Inc., founded in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu. The platform uses advanced automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing to convert spoken audio — from meetings, interviews, lectures, or any live conversation — into searchable, shareable text transcripts in real time.

The core use case is meeting documentation. Otter.ai connects directly with Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams to automatically join scheduled meetings, transcribe conversations in real time, identify different speakers, and generate structured meeting notes. This eliminates the need for manual note-taking and ensures that nothing discussed in a meeting is lost.

After a meeting ends, Otter AI analyzes the transcript to generate a structured summary, extract action items assigned to specific participants, identify key topics discussed, and produce a shareable meeting report. Team members who missed the meeting can quickly catch up through the AI-generated summary rather than reading the entire transcript or watching a recording.

The AI Chat feature allows users to interact conversationally with their transcripts and notes. Users can ask questions like "What decisions were made in the last three meetings?" or "What tasks was I assigned this week?" and Otter AI will search across all stored transcripts to provide relevant answers.

Speaker identification uses voice recognition to automatically attribute speech to different participants, labeling each speaker's contributions throughout the transcript. Over time, the system learns and improves speaker recognition for recurring participants.

Otter.ai is used widely in professional settings including team meetings, client calls, job interviews, research interviews, academic lectures, and conference presentations. The searchable transcript library creates a valuable organizational knowledge base from conversational content.