Otter.ai is a Los Altos, California-based technology company that develops speech to texttranscription applications using artificial intelligence and machine learning. Its software, called Otter, shows captions for live speakers, and generates written transcriptions of the speeches.
History
Otter.ai was founded as AISense in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, two computer science engineers with a long history of working with artificial intelligence. The idea for the company came to Liang due to difficulties remembering what was said in the many meetings he attended, and the challenge of sharing meeting information with others. Liang became the company's CEO, and Fu became VP of Engineering. In November 2017, the company announced a Series A funding round of $10M, its first venture capital investment. In January 2018, the company announced a partnership with Zoom Video Communications to transcribe video meetings after they are held. In March, the company debuted its first Otter speech translation app at Mobile World Congress. It was available for free for Google's Android and Apple's mobile products. In October, the company launched Otter for Education, a note taking tool for college students. In March 2019, the company launched Otter for Teams, a transcription and storage product for enterprises. In January 2020, now doing business as Otter.ai, the company announced another $10M funding round, led by Japanese mobile phone operator NTT Docomo’s Docomo Ventures. In April, the company announced it was offering Live Notes for Zoom calls.
Technology
To develop its speech transcription technology, the company reportedly combined deep machine learning using millions of hours of audio recordings, which were analyzed with thousands of cloud-based computers to train the software and improve the translation capabilities. The company reports that it uses proprietary algorithms to scour the web for these usable audio segments. By capturing and analyzing large amounts of speech, neural network programs can recognize speech with up to 95% accuracy.
Products
Otter.ai offers a variety of Otter-branded services for speech transcription, based on its advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Products include:
Otter Live Meeting Notes - the company's flagship product, available in a free or premium version, offering extra capabilities
Otter for Teams - a version of the company's transcription tool designed for companies, which includes Live Video Meeting Notes for real time transcription
Otter for Education - designed to assist students with note taking, by recording and transcribing lectures, recording who is talking and synchronizing the audio with the transcription
Otter Live Notes for Zoom - a tool which allows participants on a Zoom call to view the transcript in real time
Reception
Digital media website Mashable and technology publication Fast Company named Otter one of the best apps of 2018. In June 2019, Otter received a positive review from Forbes. In March 2018, technology news site ZDNet reported concerns about Otter's privacy policy, and in response the company updated the policy to clarify that it would only allow access to customer's transcriptions through lawful requests.
