Otter.ai’s voice-activated AI agent can answer questions during online meetings

Otter.ai, which is primarily known for its voice-to-text transcription service, is rolling out a voice-activated AI agent that will participate in and answer questions during online calls.

The “Otter Meeting Agent,” launched Tuesday, activates a voice agent when called upon, understands questions put to it, and pulls information from the public web or internal documents to answer queries.

Otter.ai already has a web interface and an app that transcribes voice notes to text, generating summaries of notes and allowing users to query the system via text.

The system can now do the same via voice during meetings, which can come in handy when people need immediate information at their fingertips and don’t want to type in queries, said Sam Liang, CEO of Otter.ai.

“This new AI Meeting Agent is actually going to be able to answer questions or participate in meetings and even take some actions to perform some tasks,” Liang said.

For example, in a demonstration during a Zoom videoconference, Liang asked the AI agent, participating as an attendee, “Hey Otter, who invented the audio recorder and in what year?” and the agent responded instantly: “The audio recorder was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877.”

The voice-activated agent works with Zoom and will integrate into Google Meet and Microsoft Teams software in the coming weeks.

The agent is also able to answer questions by sourcing information from corporate data. For example, it can respond to a query about subscriber numbers or growth rate by selectively pulling data from internal databases.

The AI agent can also take other actions such as scheduling a follow-up meeting or drafting an email.

The system uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to analyze user queries, which it then breaks down into subtasks and decides which functions to call or which internal system to send a query. “It could pull data from multiple places and then generate the answer to summarize the results,” Liang said.

At a recent GTC panel discussion, tech leaders stressed that customers prefer to talk to humans rather than machines. But Liang said some voice AI agents can supplement human agents and meet basic needs, such as answering simple questions.

For now, the voice-activated meeting agent is an on-demand feature answering questions from internal documents, much like text-based requests. The agent is only activated on voice requests and doesn’t interrupt conversations.

However, Otter.ai is moving in the direction where an agent will soon be an active participant, Liang said. It can even correct misinformation.

The idea that agents would take part in meetings isn’t new. More than a decade ago, in 2013, Forrester analyst J.P. Gownder predicted AI tools would participate in meetings proactively, in addition to surfacing data and insights from internal systems.

“I published a report predicting that AI would participate in meetings proactively, surfacing data and insights from internal systems,” he said this week. “I was obviously a good bit ahead of time on that one. The logic here is that meetings often don’t take advantage of the vast stores of enterprise data that we have: We make decisions without consulting our own data, insights, documents, and past conversations, which is suboptimal.”

But there are several issues at play before AI meeting participants are likely to be welcome, including accuracy and social acceptance. Participants might not like being interrupted by AI agents. And if the tool makes even one or two mistakes, humans might quickly come to distrust it.

“Can these AI meeting participants find the right data, documents, and insights out of our vast enterprise SharePoint sites to surface during a meeting?” Gownder said. “I would suggest that it will be quite a few years before this becomes mainstream, even though it offers a very logical and potentially powerful value proposition.”

Otter has multiple monthly and yearly subscription plans, including a free tier and a $30 monthly plan for business users. The subscription service also includes an enterprise plan, for which a price wasn’t given. 

Otter has 25 million subscribers but declined to detail the number of paid subscribers.