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

AI assembly notetaker apps have realized that transcribing conferences and offering summaries alone shouldn’t be sufficient to justify their enterprise fashions and valuations. They now need to act as a full workspace the place customers usher in knowledge from totally different sources, search throughout all of it, and make selections 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 may possibly hook up with and pull knowledge from outdoors apps and providers utilizing a typical normal that AI instruments are quickly adopting.

Otter has been round for almost a decade now, nevertheless it has been making strikes towards turning into an enterprise productiveness software in the previous few months. Final October, the corporate launched a manner for organizations to construct customized MCPs to entry Otter knowledge outdoors the app. The corporate’s newest transfer is extra about bringing outdoors knowledge into the app.

With this launch, customers can join their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and question that knowledge together with current assembly knowledge. The corporate stated that it’ll quickly enable connections with Microsoft Outlook, Groups, SharePoint, and Slack. Customers can’t solely seek for knowledge throughout these instruments however may push assembly summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The corporate stated 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 screen, akin 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 assembly seize — recording conferences utilizing a tool’s system audio moderately than having a bot be a part of the decision. Otter stated that it introduced this function to the Mac app late final 12 months, and is now launching a Home windows app with an analogous 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 stated that the corporate’s enterprise prospects want when a gathering notetaker joins the decision.

“Once we speak to enterprise prospects, most of them really want the word 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 word shouldn’t be restricted to at least one individual,” he instructed TechCrunch over a name.

Otter stated that it has a deduplication function that forestalls 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 12 months, the corporate stated 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 stated that the platform now has 35 million customers.