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 wish to act as a full workspace the place customers herald information 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) shopper. Meaning it will possibly hook up with and pull information from outdoors apps and providers utilizing a typical commonplace that AI instruments are quickly adopting.

Otter has been round for practically a decade now, nevertheless it has been making strikes towards changing into an enterprise productiveness instrument in the previous couple of months. Final October, the corporate launched a means for organizations to build custom MCPs to access Otter data outside the app. The corporate’s newest transfer is extra about bringing outdoors information into the app.

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

The corporate stated that it has additionally redesigned its AI assistant to be constantly current throughout the entire interface, so customers can ask questions anytime. The assistant can perceive the context of the display screen, reminiscent of 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 meeting capture — recording conferences utilizing a tool’s system audio moderately 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 analogous 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 clients desire when a gathering notetaker joins the decision.

“After we discuss to enterprise clients, most of them really desire the observe taker that joins the Zoom assembly as a result of it supplies the transparency. In addition they desire the assembly notes to be shared with all of the assembly attendees, in order that the observe will not be restricted to 1 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 users and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Whereas the corporate didn’t present a brand new set of financials, it stated that the platform now has 35 million customers.