Have you ever wished you could ask questions about a meeting as it was happening? The AI-powered audio transcription service Otter now has your back with the launch of its new feature, Otter AI Chat.
Otter AI, a business based in San Francisco, has revealed new chat features that include generative AI into the voice-to-text process. Recently, Otter has been hard at work growing its speech transcription service by including popular conferencing tools like Zoom and providing compatibility for Microsoft Outlook. The OtterPilot AI capabilities were upgraded in February of this year, adding additional automations to the company’s speech transcription service. The firm claims that its AI-driven technology can transcribe over a million words per minute.
Now, Otter’s AI does more than merely transcribe meetings and provide summaries after the fact. The new Otter Chat feature allows users to interact with an artificial intelligence chatbot from inside the user panel and ask it questions regarding the current meeting.
For instance, a user might check to see whether he or she is interested in a previously mentioned issue. Users may also ask the AI to create material based on the meeting, such as follow-ups and action items, and inquire about the mood of the meeting or a particular speaker.
It takes cues from OpenAI’s groundbreaking ChatGPT in a number of key areas.
Sam Liang, CEO of Otter, told VentureBeat, “ChatGPT is such a sensation; it shows that AI can understand human questions and can generate interesting answers.” “However, ChatGPT relies heavily on publicly available information; for corporate employees, meetings are private and… taking place in real time.”
For Otter AI Chat, Otter developed its own LLM
Despite drawing inspiration from ChatGPT, Otter AI Chat does not make use of OpenAI’s technologies. Instead, Liang emphasised his team’s custom-built AI technology that makes the new service possible.
Liang described OpenAI’s ChatGPT as being built on a large language model (LLM) that was educated using textual information found in the public domain. ChatGPT bridges the gap between humans and machines using natural language processing.
Otter AI Chat isn’t like other chatbots.
With the use of largely spoken data, “we are building the largest spoken large language model,” Liang added. “There are significant discrepancies between the [spoken] verbal data and the [written] written documents.”
People tend to be less stuffy and more conversational when relaying information orally. The tone of a speaker may be interpreted and used to infer their intentions. Without ever sharing any customer data, Otter has learned from the transcripts of over a billion internal corporate meetings.
Otter is developing an artificial intelligence chatroom
According to Liang, the Otter AI conversation interface is more than simply a human-to-bot interface; it allows for what he called “collaborative chat,” in which all participants in a meeting may engage with each other and the AI chatbot in real time.
In his opinion, “AI effectively joins human conversations,” Liang added.Liang claims that Otter AI Chat will be able to better answer with human-style speech since the model was trained on the way people really communicate, which will make the information more helpful and interesting.
The Otter AI Chat feature is a part of the company’s larger mission to use AI to improve the quality of meetings for everyone involved. According to Liang, the newly released generative AI chatbot is accessible through a text interface inside a multi-speaker conference. In the future, we want to include a speech interface so that the AI chat may be used hands-free.
“We’ll make it available through voice as well, so that effectively Otter can join your speaking session and you can ask Otter any question with voice and Otter can answer questions with voice as well,” he added.