Otter.ai rolls out a new AI-generated meeting summary feature and more collaboration tools

AI-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai is releasing a set of new meeting-focused features to boost collaboration, the company announced on Tuesday.

Most notably, the company is adding a new “Automatic Outline” feature that uses Otter’s proprietary AI to automatically create a meeting summary. The new feature aims to give you an idea of what your colleagues said during a meeting without having to listen to a recording or read an entire transcript. The new meeting summaries will be displayed in the “Outline” panel on the platform.

Otter.ai is also introducing a new “Meeting Gems” panel to capture action items, decisions and key moments from meetings. You can use the panel to assign items, add comments or ask questions. Users are able to generate a Meeting Gem directly from their meeting by highlighting snippets within the notes.

You can now also use Otter Assistant to add directly to the Otter notes a meeting slide or any other image presented during a virtual meeting. The platform’s home feed now also prioritizes meetings and post-meeting actions. You can use the redesigned home feed to access shared conversations, highlights and comments, and tagged action items. Lastly, users who have connected their Google or Microsoft Outlook calendars to Otter can now directly join their meetings from the calendar panel.

“We all spend too much time in meetings and I am really excited about the power of AI to make meetings more productive,” said Sam Liang, the co-founder & CEO of Otter.ai, in a statement. “The new Otter makes meeting collaboration easier and faster – making it an essential tool for business teams looking to improve their communication in today’s hybrid, in-person, and virtual meetings.”

The new functionalities builds on the launch of the service’s Otter Assistant feature last August, which can automatically join meetings on your calendar, transcribe conversations and share the notes with other participants. The assistant is designed to make using transcription something you don’t have to constantly remember to enable at the meeting’s start or stop at the end, while also serving as a place where participants can collaborate by asking questions, sharing photos and more, as the meeting is underway.

The Assistant first launched on Zoom and later expanded to Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco Webex. To use the tool, users need to synchronize their calendars with the service. The assistant will then automatically join all future meetings, where it appears in the meeting as a separate participant, for transparency’s sake.

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