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

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

Otter has been around for almost a decade now, but in recent months it has made strides to become an enterprise productivity tool. Last October, the company launched a way for organizations to build custom MCPs to access Otter data outside 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 retrieve that data along with existing meeting data. The company said it will soon enable connections to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Slack. In addition to searching for data in these tools, users can also push meeting summaries to Notion or compose a Gmail message.

The company said it has also redesigned its AI assistant to have a consistent presence throughout the interface, allowing users to ask questions at any time. The assistant can understand the context of the screen, such as a particular meeting or a channel, and answer questions accordingly.

Meanwhile, most note takers are following Granola’s lead and enabling botless meeting capture: 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 discussion about taking notes in meetings with bots (where a bot joins the meeting) or without bots. Sam Liang, CEO of Otter, said the company’s business customers prefer to have a note taker join the call.

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

Otter said it has a deduplication feature that prevents a swarm of bots from joining a meeting at the same time, to avoid situations where there are more bots than people on the phone.

Last year the company said it did 25 million users and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. While the company did not provide new financial data, it said the platform now has 35 million users.