Otter.ai, best known for transcribing and summarizing meetings, wants its software to work on both sides of the call as well. On October 27 the Mountain View company announced two features: Work Mode, which prepares material before a meeting and turns the conversation into finished output afterwards, and Live Assist, which offers private prompts while the call is under way.
Work Mode starts with a brief. Before a call, it draws on earlier conversations with the same customer, open action items, approaches that worked for colleagues on similar calls and recent files from connected apps such as Google Drive, then compiles them into a summary in seconds. Otter says it will soon send that brief automatically, by email and inside the app, before every meeting, so users will not need to request it.
After the meeting, the same feature is meant to produce work rather than notes. Otter's examples include turning a customer's last five calls into a point-of-view document, drafting a proposal or contract as a PDF, writing an offer letter after a final interview, filling in a candidate scorecard, updating CRM records and drafting follow-up emails. Each item is presented for the user to review and send.
Live Assist covers the middle. It appears as a small, private prompt inside the meeting window on Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet and suggests points based on what has been said. Otter gives sales and recruiting as examples: a rep might be nudged about a competitor mention, a pricing objection or the next discovery question, and a recruiter reminded to cover scorecard criteria, pay expectations and availability. Teams can build custom agents around their own playbooks to shape the tips.
Availability differs between the two. Every paying customer can use Work Mode from launch day. Live Assist opens first to enterprise accounts, and Otter says the rest of its paying base will get it within a few weeks. The company is holding a live virtual launch event with demonstrations on the day of the announcement.
The release follows Otter's announcement a week earlier that General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund would provide $320 million of growth capital, money the company said would fund product development and international expansion. Otter says it has more than 40 million users and that the time its product saves has been worth more than $1.5 billion to customers; both figures are the company's own and were not independently checked.
The launch pushes Otter further toward agent-style software that acts on meeting content, a direction rivals in AI note-taking are also taking. How well the briefs, real-time prompts and generated documents perform in practice is not yet known. Otter published customer testimonials but no accuracy or quality measurements, and in-meeting prompting raises its own questions for teams about distraction and about which data the custom agents can draw on.