How the CEO of Otter.ai pushes the company to be more than a simple meeting editor

The CEO of Otter.ai, Sam Liang, is not satisfied with the fact that the company is considered and used as a simple take -up of meeting notes. Liang wants to let’s become an essential source for businesses and a new batch of products launched on Tuesday is the first step in this development.

The ASS assistance startup based on AI, based in Silicon Valley, published a new series of tools for businesses on Tuesday, designed to better integrate meetings from meetings in other workflows by channeling this information to a central knowledge base. The objective is to develop Otter’s activity by helping companies to make the most of the meetings they record.

The new suite of Otter products includes an API that allows users to create personalized integrations with platforms such as Jira and HubSpot, an MCP server – which connects OTTER data to external AI models – and a new AI agent capable of looking for meeting notes or company presentations.

Liang told Techcrunch that it was the next phase of Otter’s life.

“We are moving from a simple notes to a knowledge base on corporate meetings,” said Liang. “This is a system recording for conversations. It can help companies increase their growth and generate measurable commercial value.”

When Otter was founded in 2016, there was only a handful of meetings of transcription of meetings, which is far from today. The AI ​​boom which started in 2022 fueled a rise in startups like Granola or Circleback. Even older players like Fireflies have noticed a renewed interest.

Liang maintains that this transition places Otter in a division distinct from that of its former peers.

According to Liang, meetings are the place where the majority of the company’s knowledge is stored, whether notes of a commercial call with a client or discussions around a marketing strategy. But without a centralized location for these meeting notes, this information can only greatly help a business.

“Often, ineffectiveness is due to information silos,” said Liang. “One team does not know what the other team does and thinks that it was planned about a month ago. Often, the plan changes, but not everyone is informed. The idea is therefore to create an authorization system so that you know that most of the (non -confidential) information is shared as largely as possible.”

Not all meetings with Otter will not be added directly to this knowledge base on the company’s scale and users can choose to restrict access to meeting notes for records dealing with sensitive information.

The confidentiality of employees and information remains a concern despite the access controls. Even if a meeting relates to a neutral subject, the Otter transcriptions select the small discussions and chatters which take place before and after the meetings, which can contain gossip or information intended to be heard only by certain participants.

Otter is also the subject of a collective appeal in August which claims that the company recorded private conversations without the consent of the user and used this information to train its transcription services.

Liang said that even if he could not specifically comment on the trial, it was not a specific problem in Otter and that, from a broader perspective, it was better to have more access to information.

“If they accuse us, then they could accuse everyone, all the tools you have heard of to write meeting notes,” said Liang. “My point of view is that we are on the right side of history. We are building this new AI revolution. If you want AI to help you, you have to put it in meetings.”