Eight years ago, Otter.ai’s pitch for its transcription app was pretty straightforward: The Mountain View, California-based startup would turn audio into readable text in real time. And it would do it for free. But in 2026, the company is now competing against a chorus of competitors that all leverage AI to provide real-time transcription. Otter’s answer to that challenge amounts to changing the channel—to go beyond transcribing to extracting insights from all that banter.

“As our CEO Sam [Liang] has shared a number of times, a transcription was never the end goal,” says Otter’s new CMO Alex Gay. “The opportunity for us really is about what can you do when you capture all of that conversation across all the contexts that organizations need.”

As in, building on that to make meetings less of a time-suck by going beyond Otter’s existing ability to summarize what people said (a feature many competitors can do) to suggest what you should say next. 

Gay argues that meetings are often inefficient for predictable reasons: Participants arrive unprepared, the right people aren’t in the room, or agreed-upon follow-up tasks never get done. The result is what Gay calls “this loop of having to have more meetings to just improve the productivity of the meeting.”

Otter hopes to break that cycle with three new features introduced Tuesday, all built around what Liang calls “the whole meeting life cycle” during a recent Zoom call.

88 per user per year; and Enterprise, with pricing based on such factors as the size and scale of a deployment.

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