Otter’s new characteristic lets customers search throughout their enterprise instruments

AI assembly notetaker apps have realized that transcribing conferences and offering summaries alone will not be sufficient to justify their enterprise fashions and valuations. They now need to act as a full workspace the place customers herald knowledge from completely different sources, search throughout all of it, and make selections about their enterprise. Following notetakers like Learn AI, Fireflies.ai, and Fathom, Otter is now launching enterprise search by appearing as a Mannequin Context Protocol (MCP) consumer. Meaning it will probably hook up with and pull knowledge from exterior apps and companies utilizing a typical commonplace that AI instruments are quickly adopting.

Otter has been round for practically a decade now, however it has been making strikes towards turning into an enterprise productiveness device in the previous few months. Final October, the corporate launched a means for organizations to construct customized MCPs to entry Otter knowledge exterior the app. The corporate’s newest transfer is extra about bringing exterior knowledge into the app.

With this launch, customers can join their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and question that knowledge together with current assembly knowledge. The corporate stated that it’ll quickly enable connections with Microsoft Outlook, Groups, SharePoint, and Slack. Customers can’t solely seek for knowledge throughout these instruments however can even push assembly summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The corporate stated that it has additionally redesigned its AI assistant to be persistently current throughout the entire interface, so customers can ask questions anytime. The assistant can perceive the context of the display screen, corresponding to a selected assembly or a channel, and reply questions accordingly.

In the meantime, most notetakers are following Granola’s lead and permitting for a botless assembly seize — recording conferences utilizing a tool’s system audio fairly than having a bot be part of the decision. Otter stated that it introduced this characteristic to the Mac app late final yr, and is now launching a Home windows app with an identical characteristic.

There was a debate round assembly note-taking with bots (the place a bot joins the assembly) or with out bots. Otter CEO Sam Liang stated that the corporate’s enterprise prospects choose when a gathering notetaker joins the decision.

“After we discuss to enterprise prospects, most of them truly choose the notice taker that joins the Zoom assembly as a result of it supplies the transparency. Additionally they choose the assembly notes to be shared with all of the assembly attendees, in order that the notice will not be restricted to at least one individual,” he advised TechCrunch over a name.

Otter stated that it has a deduplication characteristic that forestalls a swarm of bots from becoming a member of a gathering concurrently to keep away from conditions the place there are extra bots than people on a name.

Final yr, the corporate stated it had 25 million customers and $100 million in annual recurring income. Whereas the corporate didn’t present a brand new set of financials, it stated that the platform now has 35 million customers.