Otter

Every day, professionals participate in a number of meetings, yet much of the valuable information exchanged is often lost or forgotten. In 2022, the average employee spent over 21.5 hours per week in meetings, which accounts for more than half of their workweek. Per a 2019 report, ineffective meetings were estimated to cost US companies over $37 billion annually due to lost productivity and wasted time.

The rise of remote work has further amplified the reliance on virtual meetings. One study found that the number of remote meetings per employee had risen 60% from 2020 to 2022. However, keeping track of discussions, decisions, and action items remains a challenge. For example, a 2017 study found that 71% of senior managers found meetings unproductive and inefficient, leading to missed information and decreased engagement. Manual note-taking during meetings is time-consuming and distracts participants from fully engaging in discussions. Important details can be misrecorded or overlooked entirely, which can hinder organizational growth and efficiency.

The use of AI-driven transcription tools can significantly improve productivity. Organizations that leverage AI technologies can increase productivity by up to 40%. Moreover, while meetings are a crucial aspect of modern work, estimates show that they can cost organizations up to $2 million annually for every 100 employees. In a large company with 5K employees, this translates to over $100 million wasted on meetings deemed unnecessary.

Otter is an AI-powered transcription and collaboration tool designed to address these challenges. Otter's platform transcribes spoken words into text and at the same time, identifies speakers, summarizes key points, and allows users to highlight and comment on specific parts of the transcript. This improves collaboration among team members, especially in remote settings. By integrating with popular virtual meeting platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet, Otter is designed to fit into existing workflows.

Otter was founded in 2016 by Sam Liang (CEO) and Yun Fu (CTO). Liang's path to founding Otter was influenced by his prior experience at Google and his previous entrepreneurial endeavors. His passion for computer science was sparked early on while observing his older brother study the subject. Liang received a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford University under David Cheriton, widely known as the first investor in Google. As he put it in a 2022 interview:

Before founding his first startup, Liang spent four years at Google where he served as a lead on the Google Maps location service and had a hand in creating the now well-known “blue dot”, which displays a user’s current location. This was a groundbreaking innovation at the time, providing real-time location data on a mobile device. Through this experience, Liang gained an understanding of the transformative power of data at scale, as his work impacted billions of users worldwide.

In 2010, Liang founded Alohar Mobile, which Alibaba acquired in 2013 for an undisclosed amount. Alohar Mobile was backed by investors Tim Draper, Ken Xie, and David Cheriton. It was a context-aware platform that collected data through “persistent sensing” allowing a user’s phone to gather data on a person’s whereabouts and habits. During this time Fu and Liang met as Fu was the head of infrastructure at Alohar.

Speaking about how he came up with the idea for Otter in a 2022 interview, Liang said that he struggled to keep track of everything discussed during his 30 to 40 weekly meetings. To solve this, he created Otter to accurately capture and save meeting information. As he explained:

This commitment to refining the technology and multifaceted approach to solving this problem underscores the dedication that Otter has to deliver a one-stop shop for meeting transcription and information within the transcription in the generative audio AI market.

OtterPilot

OtterPilot is an automated solution for transcribing meetings across various platforms, including Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. Upon integration with a calendar system (Google or Microsoft), OtterPilot is capable of automatically joining scheduled meetings, providing real-time transcription, summarizing key points, and capturing any shared presentation slides. This functionality is intended to streamline meeting documentation and enhance organizational productivity by enabling participants to review conversation details, Q&As, and actionable meeting insights. According to the company, 62% of its users saved at least four hours per week using the tool.

Once a user’s calendar is connected to Otter, scheduled events are synchronized and OtterPilot appears as a standard participant under a customizable name. Upon the conclusion of the meeting, OtterPilot can distribute the transcript and meeting summary to the event attendees. These features can be managed and configured within Otter’s account settings, where users may modify auto-join preferences, sharing permissions, and notification settings.

OtterPilot also integrates a Chat Q&A feature, which automatically shares a link to the live transcript at the start of the meeting and provides a summary of key takeaways at the meeting’s conclusion. For instances where automatic joining is disabled, OtterPilot can be manually added to meetings, providing users with the flexibility to control which meetings are recorded. A limitation to OtterPilot as of January 2025 is that if a meeting requires a password, the meeting URL must contain the embedded password for OtterPilot to successfully join and perform the transcription.

Conversation Page

Source: Otter

Otter offers AI-generated summaries, action items, and outlines to assist users in digesting lengthy conversations. The platform automatically identifies key points, action items, and decisions made during a meeting. This feature saves time by allowing users to review the most critical parts of a conversation without reading the entire transcript. A summary is generated for conversations afterward based on the content provided during the live meeting or recording. Once the conversation is finished processing, it can be found under the summary tab.

Source: Otter

Leveraging AI, Otter identifies key priorities and next steps so that action items can be assigned to relevant team members based on the conversation content. This functionality allows teams to stay organized and keep projects moving efficiently. Users can also find the AI-generated action items in the summary tab.

Otter also provides a "view in transcript" icon for its AI-generated action items, allowing users to trace the specific part of the conversation from which an action item was created. This traceability helps provide context and ensures the action items are relevant to the conversation. It is important to note that only AI-generated action items will have this icon, as manually added action items will not be linked to transcript content.

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Manual action items can be added by typing them into the designated field. Otter Chat (discussed below) can also help generate more action items using AI, and subsequently add these suggestions to the list. Action items can be renamed or edited at any time allowing teams to refine action items as necessary, ensuring they are accurate and actionable.

Users can hover over the profile picture to see who has been assigned to a particular action item. For cases where an action item remains unassigned, users can manually assign it by selecting from a list of people with access to the conversation or those previously assigned action items. If the desired person does not appear as an option, the conversation needs to be shared with them first.

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Outlines for the conversation appear in the summary view and the sidebar of the transcript page. In either view, a user can navigate to the point the transcript references or is derived from. However, if the platform gets either the content, transcript, speaker, or any other information incorrect which might influence the summary, users can regenerate a summary after making the updates. Manual edits can be made to any part of the outline section; however, if the summary is regenerated it will override these edits.

Transcript Page

Source: Otter

A core feature of Otter is its ability to provide instant transcriptions during live conversations. Users can record meetings, lectures, or interviews directly within the app, with spoken words transcribed in sync with the conversation. This real-time transcription supports multiple speakers and can handle various accents and dialects, allowing participants to focus on the conversation without the burden of taking detailed notes. The transcribed text appears on-screen as the discussion takes place, enabling users to follow along and engage more effectively.

Otter allows users to quickly review key information from a conversation, including keywords and speaker details. The platform provides a percentage breakdown of speaking time for tagged and non-tagged participants, offering a clear view of speaker engagement.

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Users can also enhance conversations by allowing users to add reactions, comments, highlights, and images. Reactions can be added to comments, transcript content, and replies, while emojis can express agreement or amplify a point.

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Comments allow team members to interact, reply, and start discussions within the conversation. Users can tag others to notify them and can generate a link to or delete comments as needed.

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Furthermore, Otter enables users to highlight key parts of the conversation during live recordings or post-recording playback. Highlights help users quickly reference important sections. The platform also supports the addition of images next to transcript text, enhancing visual context. Images can be added in a variety of common formats, such as PNG, JPG, and GIF. If a user wanted to view only their highlights for a given transcription, they would be able to by toggling the “View Only Highlights” toggle at the top of the transcript page.

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Using advanced speaker identification technology, Otter distinguishes between different speakers in a conversation. Users can train the application to recognize specific voices, improving the accuracy of speaker labels over time. This feature is particularly useful in meetings with multiple participants, as it correctly attributes comments to each individual. If the automatically assigned speaker is incorrect, or unable to be found, collaborators on the speech can reassign and tag pieces of text, and this will update the entire transcript immediately.

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Once a recording has stopped or a file has finished importing and the audio has been processed, users can begin editing the conversation. The platform allows for a range of edits, including adding takeaways, correcting word spelling, adding or deleting words, adjusting punctuation, inserting or removing paragraph breaks, renaming conversations, and selecting or changing speakers. For users with specific terminology or unique spellings, Otter provides the option to add words to a personal vocabulary to enhance transcription accuracy in future recordings. By navigating to the transcript tab and clicking the edit icon, users can enter this transcript edit mode. After all changes have been made, Otter will realign the text with the audio where necessary.

Channels

An Otter Channel provides a centralized hub for shared conversations, facilitating streamlined communication and enhancing collaboration among team members. By creating a dedicated private or public Channel, teams can engage in discussions more efficiently, ultimately boosting productivity. Additionally, Otter Chat can be used within a Channel to extract valuable insights and information from shared meetings, further promoting a cohesive and informed workflow.

Source: Otter

A user can directly import a file into the workspace to be transcribed and available to users, and eventually for Otter AI to account in its discussions. A user can transcribe an ad-hoc recording via a device’s speakers, or paste a meeting link to send an OtterPilot to a Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meeting to eventually be shared with the channel.

Source: Otter

Users are not limited to importing conversations. They can export conversations in audio form and in text form (ie. TXT, DOCX, PDF, and SRT). However, as of January 2025, users on the free basic plan can only export a TXT file whereas on paid plans, all options are available. This export can be done on a per-conversation level or a bulk export level, which is ideal for content management, and organization purposes.

Workspaces

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Workspaces define and enable an admin to manage the membership of an organization and settings for an organization. Every user upon signing up or into the platform has access to a workspace, whether that be their own or an email domain-specific workspace. A user can determine who has been invited and joined alongside default permissions for speeches in this view.

Otter AI Chat

Otter Chat is a smart cross-conversation knowledge assistant, enabling users to query information from all relevant and recorded conversations rather than limiting responses to individual chats. This feature provides a centralized hub of knowledge, allowing users to query content, retrieve ideas, and gain insights from multiple meetings, regardless of the date or topic. By interacting with Otter Chat, users can ask questions about the content of past conversations, explore suggested prompts, and refine answers through follow-up threads. This promotes a more dynamic and informed engagement with meeting data, offering valuable support for task tracking and project management.

Users can generate answers based on shared conversations, refine queries by date and time, and view the specific conversation from which a response is pulled. Otter Chat also provides the ability to copy formatted text from prompts and answers for use in other applications. As of February 2024, it is available only on web browsers.

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A notable feature of Otter Chat is the ability to view and continue conversation threads, enabling users to ask follow-up questions and receive refined responses based on previous interactions. If a user struggles to come up with a question, there are suggested questions that users can build upon.

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The "View Sources" panel allows users to see the exact meeting or conversation from which an answer was generated, providing transparency and helping users verify the context of the information.

Source: Otter

The feature extends to live conversations and within channels as well. In a live conversation, a user can interact with Otter Chat, by simply asking it questions in the conversation view.

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In the context of a channel, a user can ask questions, and Otter Chat will answer using and referencing the conversations in the channel. This field is not limited to only Otter Chat use, a user can mention other users and can type as in a typical group chat to share a message with users of the channel. These prompts and messages will be available to everyone in a channel.

Source: Otter

As of January 2025, there is no support for audio transcription besides English (US and UK), regional accents, Spanish, and French, although Otter Chat supports multi-language translations and communication. There are also restrictions on the usage of Otter Chat. As of January 2025, the Basic Plan permits 20 monthly queries, with a cap of 3 queries per conversation. The Pro Plan increases this offering to 50 queries per user each month. For larger scale needs, the Business Plan provides 200 queries per user per month, while the Enterprise Plan allows for 500 queries per user each month.

Otter for Sales

Otter offers features specifically designed to enhance sales teams' productivity and organization through its Sales Insights functionality, only available on the Enterprise plan as of January 2025. After a sales call ends, Otter automatically generates insights that summarize key meeting points and categorize them into actionable items. These insights, which are located in the Summaries panel, help teams quickly review meeting discussions, identify important topics, and streamline follow-up actions.

Otter uses common sales frameworks like BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline) and MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion) by default, but also offers the ability for users to customize insights based on team needs, ensuring that the meeting takeaways are relevant and actionable.

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Sales Insights provides users with a detailed breakdown of meeting content, categorizing highlights and labeling each section for easy navigation. These insights, whether automatically generated or customized by the team, are accessible to all members within the workspace or those with shared access to the conversation. Users can choose to share direct links to specific insights or the entire insights tab.

Additionally, Otter allows users to customize their insights to track specific information relevant to their sales process. By typing detailed questions or prompts into the “What do you want Otter to track” field, teams can tailor the insights to better suit their needs. These customized insights are automatically generated for future meetings where applicable.

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Furthermore, Otter enables teams to manage and edit insights through workspace settings, providing options to rename, update, enable, disable, or delete insights. Teams can also regenerate insights to reflect any changes made to the conversation or speaker tags, ensuring that sales data remains accurate and up-to-date for future reference and reporting.

On the enterprise plans Otter also offers automated tagging of sales calls, facilitating seamless integration with CRM systems like Salesforce and HubSpot. When connected, Otter automatically identifies conversations that meet specific criteria and labels them as “sales” calls for syncing with the CRM. The key criteria for tagging a conversation as a sales call include it being recorded from a calendar event and having at least one external guest (i.e., someone outside of the Otter Workspace) present.

Source: Otter

Conversations can be recorded via OtterPilot — the recommended method — or manually, with users selecting the calendar event for tracking.

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Otter also offers a general Slack integration, which can also be used specifically for sales. Users can receive notifications when they are mentioned or assigned action items in an Otter conversation. Additionally, Otter conversation links shared in Slack will include rich previews, displaying meeting details and automatic summaries to provide context at a glance. Users can also share meeting summaries in specific Slack channels post-meetings, ensuring that all relevant team members are aligned and up-to-date with the discussion outcomes.

Customer

Approximately 83% of employees spent up to one-third of their workweek in meetings as of October 2023. An August 2023 survey found that 93% of American employees have complaints about their company’s typical meetings, with 45% complaining the meeting times are simply too long. Research also finds that meetings are the number one barrier to productivity, causing burnout and wasted time. Otter’s tools can help any number of employees in various industries be more productive by transcribing and distilling the required details from these meetings so it is not necessary to attend every single one.

Otter markets its transcription services to sectors including education, business media, and sales. In education, both teachers and students use Otter to transcribe lectures and enhance note-taking or to make learning more accessible. In media, Otter aims to help reporters capture accurate quotes during interviews and press conferences, helping media organizations build better user stories. For businesses, Otter simplifies meetings by providing clear transcripts, eliminating the need for manual note-taking, and ensuring efficient documentation. In sales, professionals use it to extract sale insights, facilitate follow-up communication like follow-up emails, and connect call notes to integration CRM partners like Salesforce or HubSpot.

As of January 2025, notable customers of Otter included Amazon, IBM, NBC, UCLA, and more:

Source: Otter

Market Size

Otter is well-positioned to capitalize on the growth of the generative AI space and has already demonstrated its ability to serve in a variety of multi-billion-dollar industries, including sales, marketing, and education. By 2032, generative AI could account for 10-12% of total IT hardware, software, services, advertising, and gaming expenditures, up from less than 1% in 2024. The AI meeting assistant market, valued at $1.8 billion in 2022, is anticipated to grow to $17.3 billion by 2032 with a CAGR of 25.6%.

Meanwhile, the global AI in education market reached $3.5 billion in 2023 and is projected to expand significantly, reaching $55.3 billion by 2032, with a CAGR of 35.82% from 2024 to 2032. This growth is driven by factors such as the increasing availability of digital devices, demand for personalized learning, and advancements in AI technologies. Similarly, the AI market for sales and marketing is expected to reach $10 billion by 2033, growing from $2.1 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 16.8%.

Startups

Gong: Founded in 2015, Gong has raised over $583 million as of 2025. It raised a $250 million Series E in June 2021 which valued the company at $7.3 billion. Gong’s AI-powered platform captures and analyzes customer interactions across emails, phone calls, and video meetings to provide actionable insights for sales teams. Besides transcribing, Gong also provides data-driven recommendations to improve sales performance, forecast accuracy, and deal management.

While Gong focuses specifically on revenue intelligence and sales-related conversations, Otter caters to a wider range of users across industries for general meeting transcription and collaboration. Gong integrates with significantly more partner applications than Otter does as of January 2025. Otter partners with Slack, Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Hubspot. Gong integrates with all of these and more such as Vidyard, Okta, and Genesys. Additionally, Otter offers its AI-powered features for free in its basic plan, whereas Gong’s advanced analytics are often part of a premium offering tailored to sales teams.

Fireflies.ai: Founded in 2016, Fireflies.ai provides a AI meeting assistant which records, transcribes, and generates searchable meeting notes. It has raised a total of $19 million as of January 2025, having raised a $14 million Series A in May 2021. It can identify key metrics such as speaker time, topic trackers, sentiments, and more throughout the course of a meeting similar to Otter. It is used by over 200K organizations across sales teams, recruiters, doctors, and consultants.

Also similar to Otter, the platform provides seamless integrations with conferencing apps and is a versatile solution depending on the size and sector of the enterprise. Compared to Otter, Fireflies.ai is HIPAA-compliant, making it a handy choice for doctors and healthcare workers to analyze clinical conversations. Fireflies.ai focuses on security for healthcare workers with 256-bit AES and 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption, GDPR, and more.

Fathom: Founded in 2020, Fathom is a free AI notetaker that records transcribes, highlights, and summarizes meetings. It raised a $17 million Series A in September 2024 at an undisclosed valuation which brought the company’s total funding to $21.8 million. On G2, it is rated as the highest AI Meeting Assistant tool with five stars as of January 2025, while Otter is rated at 4.4 out of five. While Fathom is free for users with no limits on its tools, Otter caters to a wider audience and provides more features including an Otter AI chat. One limitation of Otter compared to Fathom is that only has support for video recordings on its enterprise plan as of January 2025.

Supernormal: Founded in 2020, Supernormal is a Swedish AI platform for meeting transcription. It has $12 million in total funding as of January 2025, including a $10 million seed round in January 2023. Similar to Otter, platforms such as Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom are supported on Supernormal. Supernormal offers customers free unlimited notes, summaries, and transcripts, whereas Otter charges past 30 minutes. Supernormal also claims to support over 10 languages and AI agendas, which is a benefit compared to Otter which only supports three as of January 2025.

Incumbents

Zoom AI Companion: Launched in 2013, Zoom had over 300 million daily active users as of October 2024. In August 2024, Zoom AI Companion was launched to allow hosts to generate smart summaries of Zoom meetings. Recordings of meetings can be divided into sections and action items are automatically generated. In 2020, Otter and Zoom formalized a partnership for speech-to-text transcription in Zoom meetings. With the launch in 2024, Zoom AI Companion became a natively supported tool, competing directly with Otter.

Microsoft Copilot: Copilot was launched in 2023, and made available only to Microsoft Enterprise customers. This generative AI software is a companion to all Microsoft 365 apps such as Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, and more. Similar to Otter, Microsoft Teams provides summaries and answers to questions about meetings. It can answer the same kinds of prompts regarding the mood of a meeting, the action items, concerns, and takeaways.

In July 2024, CEO Satya Nadella announced an increase in Copilot customers of more than 60% quarter over quarter. While Microsoft charges $360 for its new AI features in Office365, Otter’s AI features are included for free in its basic plan. Copilot also does not have the same chat features and integrations with Slack or support for other collaboration technologies such as Notion and Google Docs that Otter has.

Medical Transcription Services

Nuance: Founded in 1992, Nuance is a subsidiary of Microsoft. It was a public company listed on the NASDAQ before Microsoft acquired it for $19.7 billion in an all-cash deal in 2021. Nuance provides a conversational AI and cloud-based ambient clinical intelligence tool for healthcare providers. Its product lineup includes the Dragon Ambient eXperience, Dragon Medical One, and PowerScribe One for radiology reporting. Dragon Medical One is its flagship product for the medical sector and remains the most featured product. It helps improve healthcare provider productivity by using advanced speech with natural language commands to document care before, during, and after the patient visit. It was ranked best in KLAS — a medical IT data reporting organization — for four consecutive years.

Dragon Medical One supports over 90 medical specialties and sub-specialties as of January 2024, so that tailored vocabularies can meet the needs of many medical fields. With over 550K users on Dragon Medical as of January 2025, Nuance is known for its healthcare industry-specific transcriptions with a focus on Electronic Health Records (EHR) integration. In comparison, Otter offers a more generalized transcription service for real-time transcriptions during meetings and other collaborative environments and supports integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot, and not Electronic Health Records.

DeepScribe: Founded in 2017, DeepScribe has raised $61.2 million across seven funding rounds as of January 2025, with a $30 million Series B in October 2023. Similar to Nuance, DeepScribe is an ambient AI transcription service. Its focus is the healthcare segment and is entirely HIPPA compliant. Its software is targeted to improve the process of taking down patient notes, by providing summaries and then documenting the applicable conditions in an EHR. During the transcription, it ensures that a patient’s personal data is anonymized and only the necessary information is kept.

As part of the product offering, it generates relevant ICD-10-CM codes after each patient-doctor conversation to simplify billing and coding. ICD-10-CM codes are a system that codes diseases and medical conditions which can then be used to determine which medication the patient should take. On the other hand, Otter serves a more generalized market with specific products targeted towards sales, education, and media. Its intent is not to be used in the healthcare market yet as it does not market HIPAA compliance, nor does it focus on integrating with EHRs like Nuance or DeepScribe. A comparable difference is the fact that DeepScribe offers 50+ different ways to organize notes and transcription, while Otter does not allow for customization for the way the transcript and summary are presented.

Source: Otter

As of January 2025, Otter offers four different pricing plans:

1. Basic (Free): The basic tier of Otter is free and offers a set of features intended for individual users and small teams. It allows a single meeting assistant to record, transcribe, and summarize conversations in real time. It provides access to Otter AI Chat, but up to 20 queries per user per month. Users can add up to 5 teammates to their workspace and integrate the service with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet to write and share notes effectively. This plan provides 300 monthly transcription minutes with a limit of 30 minutes per conversation. Additionally, each user can import and transcribe three audio or video files over their lifetime.

2. Pro ($8.33/user/month, billed annually): The pro tier, priced at $8.33 per user per month when billed annually, builds on the Basic tier by adding enhanced features for better team collaboration and at higher limits. These include shared custom vocabulary, tagging speakers, assigning action items to teammates, advanced search, export, and playback capabilities. It offers 1.2K monthly transcription minutes with each conversation capped at 90 minutes and allows users to import and transcribe up to 10 audio or video files per month.

3. Business ($20/user/month, billed annually): The business tier includes all the features of the pro tier plus additional admin features such as usage analytics and prioritized support. This plan supports participation in up to three concurrent virtual meetings for automatic note-taking and sharing. It increases the transcription capacity to 6K monthly minutes with a duration of up to four hours per conversation and offers unlimited audio or video file import and transcription.

4. Enterprise (Custom Pricing): The enterprise tier incorporates all the features of the business plan with an emphasis on advanced security and compliance controls. It introduces single sign-on (SSO), organization-wide deployment, and domain capture. Notable additions to this plan include OtterPilot for Sales and video recordings.

Otter reached 10 million meetings transcribed or over 250 million minutes in July 2019. By February 2021, the company had transcribed over 100 million meetings, accounting for 3 billion minutes. By February 2023, the number of meetings transcribed grew to over 1 billion. The company continued its upward trajectory, surpassing 50 billion minutes transcribed by February 2024. This puts the company’s average growth rate for minutes transcribed between July 2019 and February 2024 at ~128.9% per year.

The company also experienced 800% revenue growth from 2019 to 2020, driven by widespread global adoption. Between 2020 and 2022, the company also saw a 600% increase in product usage. The company has received multiple accolades, including Editors’ Choice awards from CNET for its leadership in AI, future tech, and smart home categories. In July 2024, Forbes listed it as one of the best generative AI tools to use. As of December 2023, the company had registered over 14 million users, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses, large universities, and community colleges, further solidifying its position as a leader in AI-driven transcription technology.

Otter has forged partnerships that have expanded its rea with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet. Otter has also expanded its functionality by launching an integration with Slack, bringing voice and text communication together.

In February 2021, Otter raised a $50 million Series B round, including a $10 million convertible note, at an undisclosed valuation. As of January 2025, Otter has raised a total of $73 million across three rounds. The Series B round was led by Spectrum Equity with continued participation from Horizons Ventures, Draper Associates, GGV Capital, Draper Dragon Fund, and more.

The Series B round followed Otter’s Series A, which raised $10 million in November 2017, led by Horizon Venture, and its $3 million seed round, led by DFJ DragonFund and Draper Associates, which took place in September 2016.

Medical Compliance

Otter could expand by automating the traditionally manual task of transcribing medical records. This would help reduce human errors and improve the efficiency of healthcare providers. There is no mention of HIPAA compliance on Otter’s site, but obtaining this credential would allow the company to tap into a lucrative market where accuracy, speed, and security are paramount.

The global medical transcription market is projected to grow by $24.7 billion from 2023 to 2027, with a CAGR of over 6%, underscoring the potential for AI-powered solutions in this space. The automation of transcription tasks could free up time for medical professionals and reduce costs, providing an essential service in an industry under pressure to optimize efficiency.

Moreover, AI-powered transcription could assist with real-time note-taking during patient consultations, making medical data more accessible for both healthcare providers and patients. The April 2021 acquisition of Nuance, a healthcare conversational AI solution, by Microsoft for $19.7 billion in cash further highlights the growing demand for AI in medical transcription, and Otter could leverage this trend by offering its innovative solutions to compete with established players in the market.

AI for Hiring

As companies increasingly rely on artificial intelligence to streamline recruitment, Otter can position its AI-powered transcription services as a tool for human resources departments to generate transcripts from interviews and discussions automatically. This can reduce the burden of manual note-taking during interviews, enabling HR teams to focus on evaluating candidates. Additionally, these transcriptions can be used with other AI tools to assess candidate responses, providing richer data for decision-making. By offering integration with applicant tracking systems (ATS) and HR software, Otter could enhance its presence in this sector, aligning with the broader trend of automating HR functions to improve efficiency and outcomes.

Mercor is an example of a significant player in this space. Having been valued at $250 million as of September 2024, following a $32 million Series A, Mercor demonstrates the growing investment in AI-based hiring tools. The HR market utilizing AI is rapidly expanding, with estimates suggesting the market size of outsourcing HR functions will reach $3.6 billion by 2028, driven by the need for efficiency and data-driven insights in recruitment processes. This trend further underscores the potential for Otter to integrate with AI-driven platforms to support HR teams, leveraging automated transcription alongside automatically populated review systems as it does with sales for Salesforce and Hubspot.

Internationalization

A natural evolution for Otter’s transcription services would be to enter the translation and multilingual transcription market. As of January 2025, Otter only supports UK and US English, French, and Spanish for audio transcription. As businesses become more global, there is a growing demand for content transcription and translation in multiple languages. By expanding its AI models to include real-time transcription and translation capabilities for various languages, Otter could attract international clients in sectors such as media, marketing, government, and customer support. Additionally, partnerships with global companies or translation platforms could position Otter as a key player in cross-border communication tools.

The global language services market, which includes translation and multilingual transcription, is substantial and projected to grow significantly. According to industry reports, the market size was valued at $49.6 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach $73.6 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 6.7% from 2023 to 2030. This growth is driven by the increasing need for businesses to communicate effectively across borders and the expanding demand for AI-driven language solutions in various industries.

Data and Privacy Issues

Otter records every conversation during meetings, which can include sensitive information such as discussions involving a company’s intellectual property. To maintain the trust of its users and ensure the platform continues to function effectively, Otter must place a strong emphasis on user privacy. While Otter ensures that all recorded data is securely stored in the cloud, with access strictly limited to authorized personnel within the company, there still remain risks. Otter has taken proactive measures by providing clear disclaimers, advising users to avoid sharing any sensitive or confidential information during interactions on the platform. Many businesses use Otter to capture and document internal meetings, including discussions around intellectual property and strategic planning. If any of this proprietary information were to be exposed, it could undermine a company's competitive advantage, leading to potential lawsuits or a loss of key customers.

Accuracy and Reliability of AI

As with many popular AI tools, it is possible Otter’s chatbots and summaries could provide inaccurate or outdated information. These AI hallucinations occur when an AI model generates outputs that are factually incorrect or entirely fabricated but present them with high confidence. For platforms like Otter, misinformation in industries such as law or finance can severely influence decision-making and lead to negative consequences for the company.

For example, consequences could include the potential spread of misinformation, legal misunderstandings, and inaccurate data presented. Hallucinations can also lead to reputation damage, as users may lose trust in the platform's accuracy. In addition, mishandling sensitive data due to hallucinations could result in violations of privacy regulations like GDPR. To mitigate these risks, Otter must prioritize data governance, ensure the use of high-quality training data, and incorporate humans to review AI-generated outputs. Otter provides a disclaimer for users to verify any crucial information obtained and to not always trust every AI result as a way to mitigate this risk.

Partners Becoming Competitors

Although Otter partners with Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other integrations, it faces the challenge of partnerships turning into competition. Microsoft Copilot was launched in 2023 and provides summaries and transcriptions for Teams. In August 2024, Zoom AI Companion was launched which also competes directly with Otter. This tool also generates smart summarizations and is native to Zoom. Thus, Otter faces fierce competition from platforms it conducts business with which could result in a breakdown in partnerships. When these native tools gain more popularity, there is also a risk for companies or customers to prefer them over third-party integrations. For example, Boise State University released news to its students that if they are using Otter, they should swap to Zoom AI Companion as other unofficial tools may violate the school’s security and privacy policy.

Since its founding in 2016 by Sam Liang and Yun Fu, Otter has emerged as a leading meeting collaboration tool transcribing billions of meeting minutes. The company’s core focus is on simplifying how meetings operate, removing the need to worry about details which allows people to focus on the meeting at hand by providing transcriptions, meeting notes, and AI-identified key points. Otter has distinguished itself through partnerships and its suite of available tools. Looking forward, Otter has the opportunity to expand to international markets, hiring, and medical compliance.