Otter.ai Introduces AI-Powered Meeting Agents to Revolutionize Virtual Collaboration

Otter's new AI agent can speak up in meetings

Jess Weatherbed is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews. Otter, the AI-powered automated transcription service, is launching a trio of artificial intelligence agents that aim to provide quick assistance and boost productivity during calls and meetings. The most notable is the aptly named Otter Meeting Agent, a voice-activated meeting assistant that's capable of using company data to answer questions and complete tasks. Otter says its new Meeting Agent is a "transformative evolution" of the existing AI meeting chatbot it already offers. As such, the video Otter released demonstrating some of the Meeting Agent features shows off some text-based capabilities that the older AI assistant already provided, such as "attending" online meetings, transcribing conversations, and summarizing information. The Meeting Agent, however, can now answer questions based on information in the company's meeting database, and users can ask it to schedule future meetings and draft emails using "natural voice interaction." Otter says the AI Meeting Agent can currently be used on Zoom calls, and is being "incrementally rolled out" to all Otter.ai users. The Meeting Agent will be supported on Microsoft Teams and Google Meet in the coming weeks. Otter is also launching a Sales Agent that provides live coaching assistance during calls to help sales representatives close deals and handle complaints, and a Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent that can autonomously demonstrate products "without human intervention," according to Otter. The Sales Agent is supported on "all virtual conferencing platforms," and is available to Otter enterprise sales customers. The SDR Agent is live on Otter's website and companies interested in purchasing it will need to contact Otter directly. Otter says it's also planning to release additional Agents "in the future" that specialize in marketing, recruiting, and "other functions."

How Otter.ai's new AI agents can play key roles in your live meetings, and more

No mere note-takers, Otter's three new AI agents act as virtual assistants to help run and manage your business meetings. Here's what each one does. Do you ever need help organizing and running your live meetings? Otter.ai is introducing a trio of virtual assistants that could provide that helping hand. Announced on Tuesday, each of the three AI agents has a specific purpose. First up is the Otter Meeting Agent. This one is a voice-activated agent that can join your live meetings as a virtual participant. Once the meeting starts, the agent can answer questions based on accessible information from your company's meeting database. You can also talk to the agent to tell it to handle certain follow-up tasks, such as scheduling another meeting or drafting emails. Also: 5 ways to boost your team's productivity - without relying on generative AI The Meeting Agent is gradually being rolled out to all Otter.ai users for virtual meetings on Zoom. Support for Microsoft Teams and Google Meet will launch in the coming months. Next up is the Otter Sales Agent, which offers real-time coaching for sales representatives speaking with customers. To help the rep, the agent can guide them through the conversation and even provide tips on how to handle objections from a customer who's hard to sell. Looking ahead, Otter also plans to unveil similar agents for marketing, recruiting, and other areas. The Sales Agent is currently available to enterprise sales customers and can be used with any virtual meeting service. Last is the Otter SDR (Sales Development Representative), which can independently perform live product demos. For example, visitors to your website could learn about a product on the fly without having to tie up an employee. The SDR Agent is already live on Otter.ai's website. Those who want to purchase it should contact Otter's sales team. Initially known for its speech-to-text transcription service, Otter.ai has since expanded into overall meeting assistance and support. In this regard, the new AI agents aren't the company's first foray into agentic AI or automated chatbots. In June 2023, Otter introduced a chat AI that can join meetings and answer questions about any content that was shared or discussed. After a meeting ends, the AI can also create action items, summaries, follow-up emails, and blog posts. Also: AI agents aren't just assistants: How they're changing the future of work today Otter offers four different plans depending on your needs or the needs of your company. The free plan includes the Otter AI Chat and is compatible with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to automatically write and share notes. The freebie restricts you to 300 transcription minutes per month, 30 minutes per conversation, and the ability to import only three audio or video files. At $16.99 per user per month (or $8.33 per user per month for an entire year), the Pro plan allows for 1,200 monthly transcription minutes and 90 minutes per conversation. At $30 per user per month (or $20 per user per month for an entire year), the Business plan increases the limits to 6,000 monthly transcription minutes and 4 hours per conversation. This one also offers a free 7-day trial. Finally, an Enterprise plan is designed for use across an entire organization.

Otter.ai's Meeting Agent can schedule calls and write emails for you

The next time you join a video call, Otter.ai is hoping its new AI tool will help make things run smoother. On Tuesday, the company introduced the Otter Meeting Agent. It's part of a suite of three new AI helpers designed to assist a variety of different users. The first of those, the voice-activated Meeting Agent, can schedule follow-up calls and draft emails for you. It can also answer questions based on information it finds in your company's meeting database. "This agent goes beyond simple transcription and empowers users to interact with AI meeting data in real-time to increase productivity," explains Otter.ai. The two other agents the company is releasing today can provide real-time coaching to sales agents during customer calls and live demos to potential customers. Otter.ai says it plans to release more "vertical" agents in the future. They will be designed to assist marketing, recruiting and other job functions. In the meantime, Otter.ai has begun rolling out the Meeting Agent to all users. As of today, it works with Zoom exclusively, with support for Microsoft Teams and Google Meet arriving in the coming weeks. If you don't have access right away, it may take a few days before the company rolls out the agent to you.

Agentic AI is changing online meeting platforms: Moving from silent observer to active participant

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Online meetings used to be much the same as their physical world counterparts. With the introduction of generative AI online meeting platforms began to add new insights including voice transcriptions services. Platform vendors including Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Cisco WebEx have steadily integrated capabilities that go beyond what in-person physical meetings can provide. Now in the emerging era of agentic AI, online meetings are poised to diverge even further with a new wave of innovations. Zoom recently announced its agentic AI efforts which aims to create the paradigm shift from meetings to milestones. Microsoft has added copilot actions which can integrate with its Microsoft Teams service helping users inside of meetings to get insight and connect with other Microsoft services. Cisco has been steadily expanding its AI capabilities in Webex, and announced a Webex AI agent at the end of 2024 that helps with contact center deployments. Another firm that has been particularly active in the space is Otter AI, which is in a somewhat differentiated position in that it is not directly tethered to any one specific online meeting vendor platform. While Otter first made its mark as an AI powered voice transcription service, it has added an AI assistant called Otter Pilot, an AI chat assistant and a series of meeting capabilities known as Meeting GenAI. Today Otter is going a step further, with its foray into agentic AI. While some of the agentic AI features that Otter is adding are not unique, it is doing at least one thing that isn't yet part of every agentic AI meeting technology. Otter AI is now being integrated as an entity inside of a meeting that can actually respond by voice to queries. No longer is the AI an external participant accessible just via a chat window, AI is now a live entity that is literally part of the meeting. The rise of AI meeting agents: Beyond silent observers For the last several years, AI meeting assistants have been passive observers -- transcribing conversations, creating summaries and allowing post-meeting queries. Otter is now changing this dynamic with its AI Meeting Agent, which can actively participate in conversations when summoned. "The new AI meeting agent we're building will be able to help you with voice in real-time meetings," Sam Liang, CEO of Otter AI told VentureBeat. "During the meeting, you can say, 'Hey Otter,' and ask it questions." In a live demonstration with VentureBeat, Liang showed how the agent could answer factual questions, provide meeting summaries and even schedule follow-up meetings -- all through voice commands during an active conversation. What makes this particularly powerful is the agent's ability to connect to a company's knowledge ecosystem. "This agent can become a domain expert," Liang noted. "When you're having a meeting, it has almost infinite knowledge from the internet, but this agent also has knowledge about your enterprise." Autonomous agents: When AI runs the meeting Taking agentic capability a step further, Otter is also launching an autonomous SDR (Sales Development Representative) agent that can independently conduct entire meetings without human intervention. This agent greets website visitors, conducts product demonstrations and schedules follow-up meetings with human sales representatives. "We cannot hire a million human agents to answer questions, but we built this Otter SDR agent that functions like a sales development representative who can greet every single visitor and give them a live demo," Liang said. The use of chatbots and avatar based systems is not a new thing. Liang argued that what distinguishes his company's technology from existing avatar-based solutions is its ability to conduct multimedia product demonstrations in real time. The autonomous agent can share screens, demonstrate product features and respond to specific questions about functionality and pricing. The technical architecture of agentic AI for meetings Agentic AI is an overloaded and somewhat overhyped term in the industry today overall. Functionally agentic AI is about enabling actions, which can be by combining multiple models together with a tool like LangChain, as well as by using the function calling capabilities present in many models. Liang has an even more nuanced definition for agentic AI. "Agents in general are a more sophisticated AI system that can break down a large and complicated task into smaller tasks," he said. "It can do reasoning and it can do some planning to perform a task." Otter is not using LangChain, but rather has developed its own custom technology specifically designed for the challenges of multi-speaker voice environments. The technical architecture combines both public knowledge retrieval and proprietary enterprise information through a custom RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) implementation. This enables the agent to understand company-specific information like employee names, project terminology and internal acronyms. The future of meeting intelligence isn't just agentic AI What agentic AI is bringing to online meeting platforms represents a powerful new set of capabilities for organizational efficiency. For decades, organizational efficiency experts have warned about the risks of wasted time in meetings. Modern AI-powered platforms are changing that risk. Last week Zoom's CTO told me that his goal was to move the technology from meetings to milestones, where the output of a meeting isn't just another meeting but actionable things that will benefit the organization. While agentic AI can create workflows, there is still also benefit in regular AI assistants that are not actually agentic. There will still be standalone AI assistants and fully agentic ones and that's a good thing, according to Anurag Dhingra, SVP & GM, Enterprise Connectivity and Collaboration at Cisco. "While AI agents act as autonomous do-ers and AI assistants serve as prompted helpers, both offer benefits in boosting productivity and enhancing overall collaboration," Dhingra told VentureBeat. "It's not a matter of choosing one over the other but rather leveraging their combined strengths to create environments where teams can focus on innovation and strategic decision-making." What is also starting to happen is more interoperability across different platforms. For example, Cisco's AI Assistant will work with workflow applications such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Outlook. Strategic implications of Agentic AI for enterprise meetings For enterprises evaluating their AI adoption roadmap, Otter's approach to meeting agents represents a strategic inflection point. Rather than implementing general-purpose AI and hoping for ROI, organizations should consider how domain-specific meeting agents can address concrete pain points with measurable impacts. As AI continues to evolve from tools we use, to colleagues we work with, the differentiation will increasingly be found not in the underlying models but in how effectively they're trained to understand specific business contexts and domain knowledge.

As if your work meetings weren't already fun enough, now Otter has a new all-hearing AI agent that remembers everything anyone has said and can join in the discussion

Imagine a new work colleague who remembered everything you or anyone else ever said in a meeting. Wouldn't that be, er, fun? Well, it seems something like that is for real and it's the new Otter AI Meeting Agent (via The Verge). Otter already had a text-based agent for its collaboration and AI-transcription platform. But the new Otter AI Meeting Agent can listen and it can talk. Huzzah. Otter says it's compatible with multiple video conferencing platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet. Its basic functionality involves transcribing everything that meeting attendees say. It can then summarise meetings, generate lists of key insights and so on. The new bit is the voice-activated agent that's listening all the time, recording everything, is able to access the company-wide meeting databases of what everyone else has been saying and can participate in meetings, answering queries and carrying out tasks. Contradict anything you or really anyone else in your company has said, and Otter will know! That could be incredibly useful. Of course, it could also be unnerving and difficult to deal with, too. Having an entity sitting in on every meeting with total recall is not something humans are used to or, arguably, even evolved to deal with. Otter also has a new Sales Agent which can apparently conduct live coaching assistance during calls to help sales representatives close deals. Finally, Otter has a new Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent that can demonstrate products "without human intervention." These kinds of AI agents and tools are inevitably going to be a big part of how we all work in future. Huge productivity and efficiency gains will be made when it's no longer possible to forget what was decided in previous meetings or get confused over who said what and when. Equally, however, it also feels like just being human could get trickier. Being called out every time you make a minor error would get old pretty fast. And we humans do tend to enjoy trading in qualitative as much as the quantitative. Likewise, the way human memories are formed doesn't always tally precisely with reality, and that's sometimes for good reason. Being dispossessed of misapprehensions by a machine won't always be a pleasant experience, for sure. Likewise, a little artistic license can sometimes go a long way. Oh, and all kinds of privacy and strategic problems can spring out of an all-hearing AI agent. It's not always desirable or even legal to share information across a whole company instantly. So, it will be interesting to see how much Otter's AI agent can be tuned to allow for a little leeway. In the meantime, and for the edification of any AI agents in the vicinity, I for one...well, you know the drill!

Otter's new AI agents are built to boost sales and streamline meetings

Otter, the AI-powered meeting assistant and transcription service, is introducing a new AI agent capable of answering spoken questions from meeting participants in real time. The AI can also perform tasks like scheduling follow-up meetings and assigning action items to the meeting record stored on Otter's platform. When responding to questions, it can draw on both publicly available information for quick research queries and knowledge gained from previous company meetings. The AI will only provide answers based on meeting records that all current participants have permission to view, ensuring confidential information remains protected. The tool can also be connected to other sources of information, like company knowledge bases or customer-relationship management (CRM) software, and its abilities will only grow over time. "It's some simple tasks, but pretty soon, it can do more and more complicated tasks," Otter CEO Sam Liang says.