When I joined a management consulting firm right out of undergrad, the first task I was given was to take down meeting notes.
I had to diligently listen to what each person said, and note down the major bullet points, write down the next steps, make the formatting nice and reader friendly and then send it out to the entire team.
That was 5 years ago, and today, I learnt that, that part of my job has been automated completely by AI.
The tool I’m talking about has widespread ramifications- for professionals who want a quick summary of the meetings they attended yesterday but don’t want to do the administrative work of actually writing it down-to even students who need to take copious notes of what the teacher says.
The tool I’m talking about is called Otter AI.
What it does:
Otter AI simply records your speech and transcribes it into text. You could do this as a standalone (say you’re recording someone talking- like a professor in class) or you could record your Zoom/Google Meet call and it’ll transcribe it too.
I tried it out and while it’ll get one-odd word wrong, it transcribed a 3 minute speech of mine near perfectly.
You might say- great- it helps automate the note taking part. But how does it help summarize everything into handy bullet points?
That’s the catch- right not Otter doesn’t (although I don’t think it’ll be long before they start offering that too).
For now- the workaround I’ve found is to simply copy paste the entire transcript from Otter into Chat GPT-3 and ask it to summarize the transcript into a few bullet points. I even asked Chat GPT to bold the most relevant parts of the bullet points and voila! I have a perfectly formatted summary of the transcription.
If only I had a tool like this 5 years ago.
How To Use Otter AI To Take Notes
- Go to www.otter.ai and sign up
- Press ‘Record’ – blue button on top right corner.
- A screen opens up which shows the entire speech being transcribed.
- You can then copy this text into CHAT-GPT and ask it to summarize and format the text.
Can You Use Otter AI For Free?
Otter AI allows users to use it’s services for free upto 30 mins/day. To use it for longer, they offer a ‘Pro’ plan for $8.33/mo that allows 1200 monthly transcription minutes at 90 minutes per conversation. They also have a ‘Business’ plan at $20/mo that offers 6000 monthly transcription minutes at 240 minutes per conversation.
Zoom Transcription Vs Google Meet Transcription Vs Otter AI Transcription
Overall, Otter AI has the most accurate transcription hands down, with both Zoom and Google Meet’s in-built auto-transcribing services being quite inaccurate.
Can You Use Otter AI Offline?
No, it can only be used online.
Otter AI Alternatives
Here are a few other competitors to Otter AI that I am excited to explore:
- Airgram- allows multilingual transcription (8 languages) as well as allows you to take video snippets of the meeting highlights
- tl;dv- multilingual transcriptions.
- Fireflies.ai- allows smart search and topic tracker