Quickly becoming a favorite tool of remote teams, journalists, and business leaders worldwide, Otter.ai is an A.I.-powered voice transcription service that turns voice conversations into smart notes that can be easily searched and shared in real-time and for future use. Depending on your needs and your preferred way of working, you can use the software to take notes at meetings and interviews, capture thoughts and ideas while on the go, or even transcribe existing recordings and podcasts.
Enthusiastically endorsed by our own CEO Remco Livain, Otter.ai is proving to be quite a game-changer in terms of how teams communicate and collaborate. In his words: “I absolutely love otter.ai, it’s one of the tools that I’ve just recently found out about, and it solves so many problems for me that I don’t even know where to start!”
Sound like something you might want to try out? Let’s take a look at a few of the different ways you can put this tool to work for yourself or your organization.
Automatically transcribe your Zoom meetings
With a relatively new addition to the Otter arsenal of tools—Otter Assistant—you can automatically join all Zoom meetings on your calendar, have the conversations transcribed, and seamlessly share the notes with other participants. Though Otter.ai was previously integrated with Zoom, the new assistant function is designed to make using transcription automatic. In other words—you don’t have to worry about enabling it at the meeting’s start or stopping it at the end.
To use Otter Assistant, you simply have to synchronize you Google or Microsoft Calendar with Otter’s service. The assistant will then automatically join all future Zoom meetings.
Use Otter.ai to tag your conversations
Another super useful feature are automatic tags. After a meeting, the tool will process the full conversation and skim the text for words that have been used frequently such as an idea, a to-do list, or a certain recurring concept. It then highlights these elements so everyone can quickly identify what they are.
As Remco explains:
“This is really helpful, as it allows you to simply skip to the right parts of the conversation and say, “Hey, this ‘to-do’ requires immediate action,” or “this one can go on our project list.” The process is seamless because the tag “project list” or “project” will just show up at the top of the page. You can then click on it and it shows you every point where that was said within the conversation. It eliminates a lot of the work that has to be done to collect insights or consolidate learnings from a conversation or a call, so you can easily share them with the rest of the team.”
Create a vocabulary all your own
Otter.ai also lets you customize your settings so that organization-specific or emerging trend words are not overlooked. You can simply add proper names, jargon, acronyms, and phrases as Custom Vocabulary.
As Otter.ai VP of Product Simon Lau explained to Verdict:
“Even at an individual account level, you as an Otter user can go into your settings and be able to add custom vocabulary. It makes sense to provide a very simple and easy way for customers to add custom vocabularies such as acronyms such as jargon, unique spellings of people’s names; there might podcasters who would be interviewing people and, and they want to make sure that as they interview their guests their names are transcribed correctly.”
Take real-time notes you can annotate collaboratively
You can also easily take notes during a meeting or conversation by simply highlighting action items, decisions, and other key points with one click. You can also make this collaborative process by sharing the Live Notes—enabling everyone to highlight, comment, and add photos during and after the meeting. It even has a function to allow you to simply export the summary of highlights so that you don’t have to comb through the whole recording to find the key points, saving a lot of time and frustration.
At GANDT, we’re all about finding ways to facilitate collaboration and make communication smoother for everyone—Otter.ai has proved a valuable tool to do this. In the fast-paced world of consultancy, being able to quickly and efficiently access past ideas, notes and, collaborations is a crucial way to get ahead. For us at GANDT in particular, transparency on how we work is one of our key goals. Otter.ai is another weapon in our arsenal that allows us to Work Out Loud in new ways with our clients, thereby providing absolute clarity and visibility into our work and thought processes.
You can read Remco’s full take on Otter.ai here or follow this link to try it out for yourself.
