Slack is partnering with Otter.ai, a speech-to-text transcription service to “use AI to bridge the work communications gap.” The partnership comes amidst Slack’s ongoing platform overhaul, where it’s working on redesigning its user experience and significantly elevate the impact and value for businesses already entrenched in its ecosystem.
Slack users will be able to utilize Otter’s transcription tools before, during, and after meetings to obtain AI-generated insights that can subsequently be shared with other team members.
Why it matters: The multitude of features in the app could assist professionals by eliminating time-consuming tasks such as debriefing team members not in attendance at meetings, taking individual notes, and possibly even avoiding meetings altogether that aren’t crucial to the business.
- Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai, suggested the features will help to boost engagement: “Otter for Slack is the first step in unifying voice and text communication between meetings and Slack — providing conversation continuity among team members.”
- While a meeting is in progress, Otter.ai will summarize key points by capturing information on slide decks. Following a meeting, it will automatically send an AI-generated summary to teammates and will send assignees appropriate action items within Slack.
- As internal meetings can often contain confidential information, the use of a tool such as Otter.ai can introduce risk given there’s a lack of clarity around where the info is being stored, how it’s stored, and most importantly how secure it is. This is reminiscent of Zoom’s recent privacy challenges around their new Terms of Service and decision to grant itself the right to user assets as well as its ambiguity around opt-ins for the training of its new AI machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.
Go Deeper —> Otter.ai partners with Slack to share meeting insights with your team- ZDNet
