With the new tool out by Otter.ai, Zoom users can open a secure, interactive transcripts directly from video conferences, both during, and after meetings. The company’s new interactive transcriptions come at a time where remote work is more prevalent than ever before. Industries such as distance learning, healthcare, sales, and customer support now depend on video conferencing tools like Zoom.
According to Otter.ai, this is the first of many video collaboration integrations it plans to release in hopes of supporting remote workers and distance learners. The company’s even offering two free months of the service when users sign up with the promo code ‘COVID19OTTER.’ With the use of the new functionalities, end-users can highlight, share, search, and review their notes. Sam Liang, CEO, and Founder, Otter.ai, said in a statement:
“Virtual meetings have skyrocketed during the COVID-19 outbreak as organizations recognize that high-quality voice meeting notes are a critical tool for employee productivity when collaborating within an office or in any virtual meeting”
Let’s dive into what can be done with the new features for Zoom users.
Otter.ai Live Video Meeting Notes for Zoom
‘Live Transcription,’ lets meeting attendees open transcripts during a live call and highlight, comment, as well as add photos to live meeting notes. Following a call, end users can leverage ‘Post-Meeting Transcription,’ the automatic downloading of Zoom cloud recordings for transcription. There’s even headset support, a feature that captures both sides of a conversation when using headsets or earbuds. Each feature does require organizations have an active Zoom subscription.
Offering an enterprise-ready web and mobile application that extends collaboration, administration, and security capabilities, like real-time, shareable, transcriptions you can annotate, the new solution is a powerhouse.
Because of the nature of artificial intelligence (AI), the system learns the way teams speak, creating a custom dictionary of sorts to enhance the accuracy of unique names, industry-specific terms, acronyms, and jargon, something most industries can relate to, especially those in UC&C (See what I did there?)
Also, there’s centralized billing, user management, usage statistics, and two-factor authentication for heightened security, features accessible with a subscription.
Filling a Necessary Gap
As Zoom grows in popularity, one can only assume this is not the last we’ll hear about such integrations that fill a gap where video conferencing systems like Zoom fall short.
Good meeting transcriptions are hard to come by, and it will be interesting to see how the offering adds value to countless organization’s technology stacks. It will be particularly riveting to see what it does for the education sector, too. As with any automatic speech recognition tool, the system could use some refining because currently users have to do a bit of work – mostly in the name of training the AI engine, but still.
*Correction, this offering is for Zoom users.
