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

AI assembly notetaker apps have realized that transcribing conferences and offering summaries alone is just not sufficient to justify their enterprise fashions and valuations. They now need to act as a full workspace the place customers herald information from totally different sources, search throughout all of it, and make choices 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. Which means it will probably hook up with and pull information from outdoors apps and companies utilizing a standard commonplace that AI instruments are quickly adopting.

Otter has been round for almost a decade now, but it surely has been making strikes towards changing into an enterprise productiveness instrument in the previous couple of months. Final October, the corporate launched a method 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 mentioned that it’s going to quickly enable connections with Microsoft Outlook, Groups, SharePoint, and Slack. Customers can’t solely seek for information throughout these instruments however may also push assembly summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The corporate mentioned 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, comparable 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 meeting capture — recording conferences utilizing a tool’s system audio relatively than having a bot be part of the decision. Otter mentioned that it introduced this function to the Mac app late final yr, and is now launching a Home windows app with an identical function.

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 mentioned that the corporate’s enterprise prospects want when a gathering notetaker joins the decision.

“Once we discuss to enterprise prospects, most of them truly want the be aware taker that joins the Zoom assembly as a result of it gives the transparency. In addition they want the assembly notes to be shared with all of the assembly attendees, in order that the be aware is just not restricted to 1 particular person,” he advised TechCrunch over a name.

Otter mentioned that it has a deduplication function that stops 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 mentioned 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 mentioned that the platform now has 35 million customers.