Otter’s new feature lets users search across their business tools

AI meeting note taking apps have realized that transcribing meetings and summaries alone is not enough to justify their business models and valuations. They now want to act as a complete workspace where users pull data from different sources, search across it all and make decisions about their business. Following note takers like Read AI, Fireflies.ai and Fathom, Otter is now launching enterprise search by acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. This means it can connect to and pull data from external apps and services using a common standard that AI tools are quickly adopting.

Otter has been around for nearly a decade now, but it’s been making strides toward becoming an enterprise productivity tool in the past few months. Last October, the company launched a way for organizations to build custom MCPs to access Otter data outside of the app. The company’s latest move is more about bringing external data into the app.

With this launch, users can connect their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query this data along with existing meeting data. The company said it will soon allow connections with Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Slack. Users can not only search for data across these tools, but can also send meeting summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The company said it has also redesigned its AI assistant to be consistently present across the entire interface, allowing users to ask questions at any time. The assistant can understand the context on the screen, such as a specific meeting or channel, and answer questions accordingly.

Meanwhile, most note-takers are following Granola’s lead and allowing for botless meeting recording — recording meetings using a device’s system audio instead of having a bot join the call. Otter said it brought this feature to the Mac app late last year, and is now launching a Windows app with a similar feature.

There has been a debate about meeting recording with bots (where a bot participates in the meeting) or without bots. Otter CEO Sam Liang said the company’s enterprise customers prefer when a meeting note taker joins the call.

“When we talk to enterprise customers, most of them actually prefer the note-taker to participate in the Zoom meeting because it provides the transparency. They also prefer the meeting notes to be shared with all the meeting participants so that the note is not limited to one person,” he told TechCrunch over a call.

Otter said it has a deduplication feature that prevents a swarm of bots from joining a meeting simultaneously to avoid situations where there are more bots than humans on a call.

Last year, the company said it had 25 million users and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. While the company did not provide a new set of financials, it said the platform now has 35 million users.