Web-based transcription service Otter.ai is expanding its toolkit with Meeting GenAI, aimed at corporate customers who want to increase meeting productivity while decreasing effort. Multi-meeting capabilities have been added using Otter AI Chat, which can respond to queries like “What did I miss in the meetings from the past two weeks?” Conversation Summary View summarizes meetings in real-time along with automatically identified action items that are assigned owners, deadlines and tracking. Otter is positioning itself as a David versus the Goliaths of AI meeting assists: Microsoft Copilot, Zoom AI Companion and Google’s Gemini for Workspace.

Otter integrates with other popular meeting providers, including Zoom. It added AI chat capabilities in June 2023, but key to the upgrades with GenAI Meeting is the ability to search multiple events, VentureBeat notes. Otter is offering the new Meeting GenAI features in its plans including the free Otter Basic plan and $20 per month per user Otter Business plan.

Otter CEO Sam Liang, who founded the company eight years ago as an AI-first enterprise, told TechCrunch the new AI tools were inspired by his own busy schedule of “sometimes more than 30 meetings every week.” Liang admits he couldn’t physically attend multiple meetings at the same time, “‘but my OtterPilot would tune into those meetings on my behalf,’ he said, referring to the Otter feature that lets an AI bot record a meeting for you to review later.”

The new Otter AI Chatbot lets you query specific things like “Did they change the release date?” or “What did the CMO say?” And it accesses information across all meetings, not just a single event. Responses generate content like emails and status updates that can be disseminated to teammates.

The AI Chatbot can also join Otter channels for group chats, interacting like other participants when asked a question. For example, users could pause to ask the chatbot, “Hey Otter, what is our revenue?” and get a quick response. “The eventual goal is to have Otter more proactively participate by chiming in when it thinks it has something helpful to offer, by analyzing what’s being discussed,” TechCrunch reports.

“These features transcend AI note-taking and is a new paradigm that will empower Otter to proactively join live human conversations and intelligently chat with multiple human participants in real-time meetings — providing relevant insights, generating content, and identifying next steps to move work forward,” Liang explained in the product announcement.