Since launch, Otter has expanded its product to millions of users and now offers both an Otter for Teams and enterprise tier. You also can upload photos alongside the recording. The resulting transcript is searchable, and identifies the different speakers and key phrases.

The product itself creates automated transcriptions in real time, as speakers are talking. This is a different sort of technology than what’s used in today’s voice assistants, like Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa, as it’s focused on transcribing longer, human-to-human conversations, which are spoken naturally. Otter CEO and founder Sam Liang, along with a team hailing from Google, Facebook, Nuance and Yahoo as well as Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge, developed a technology specifically designed to capture conversations - like meetings, interviews, presentations, lectures and more. Otter launched its service in 2018, offering a way for users to search voice conversations as easily as they can today search their email or their text. To date, Otter has raised $23 million in funding from NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Fusion Fund, GGV Capital, Draper Dragon Fund, Duke University Innovation Fund, Harris Barton Asset Management, Slow Ventures, Horizons Ventures and others. However, the new round was $10 million in total, we’re told. The investment was made by DOCOMO’s wholly owned subsidiary, NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc., but the size was undisclosed. The two companies are teaming up to support Otter’s expansion into the Japanese market, where DOCOMO will be integrating Otter with its own AI-based translation service subsidiary, Mirai Translation, in order to provide accurate English transcripts, which are then translated into Japanese. Otter.ai, an AI-powered transcription app and note-takers’ best friend, has received a strategic investment from Japan’s leading mobile operator and new Otter partner, NTT DOCOMO Inc.

Otter voice recognition