Otter is making AI bots part of the group chat

Otter, the automated transcription service, is rolling out a new AI feature that lets groups ask a chatbot questions about what happened in their past meetings. It takes information from all the meetings that group members were in and answers prompts like, “What did we decide on yesterday?”

The feature is called “AI Chat in Channels,” and it basically opens up Otter’s AI chats to a group instead of the single-user experience they are now. Channels, which can be found within the Otter platform, function a lot like Slack chats. They let people talk with frequent collaborators and share transcripts with each other.

Most generative AI chat features — the kinds that trawl through a user’s agenda or emails — are normally only available in single conversations, where only one person is interacting with the AI. But Otter says AI Chat in Channels lets multiple people ask Otter’s AI questions.

Otter hopes that the group chat feature should let teams work together faster because they can all talk about projects to get information from the chatbot without needing to go to a different channel.

Otter is also expanding the breadth of meetings that its AI chatbot can pull data from. Previously, if a user launched Otter’s AI chatbot while accessing a specific transcript, the chatbot could only answer questions about that meeting or conversation. Otter will now expand that to all meetings and transcripts that the user has.

The company is also adding an AI conversation summary, which will identify action items even while the meeting is ongoing.

Otter has been adding generative AI features over the past couple of years. It launched a chatbot last year that allowed the bot to “attend” meetings for people. In 2022, it introduced meeting summaries to transcripts. As an Otter user, I can confirm those summaries exist, though I have yet to use any other generative AI features on the platform.

All of the AI features will be available to all Otter users, including the free Basic plan.