Use AI to automatically transcribe your Google Meet meetings

A new Google Chrome extension helps eliminate the pains of transcribing your Google Meet video meetings, interviews, and lectures. Otter.ai makes note-taking easy by transcribing and captioning all your chats in real-time and lets you save and share the transcripts with participants.

The AI-powered assistant differs from other transcription services because its AI model was built from the ground up to specifically handle long-form, multi-speaker, and complicated meeting situations.

“Meetings usually run long, could be 30 minutes, 60 minutes, and people interrupt each other all the time. People may speak a little faster or a little slower. They may pause and hesitate and restart and suddenly change topic,” said Otter.ai CEO and Co-founder Sam Liang in an interview on the NVIDIA AI podcast.

“All of these make taking notes for meetings way more complicated. So, that’s why we build AI technologies to optimize note-taking for meetings,” he continued.

Since Otter uses Ambient Voice Intelligence, it can recognize voices and even learn new terminology. With the tool, you can find what you need quickly. By using a summary keyword, you can see where that word appears in all instances. You can also speed up the playback or skim through long recordings.

Besides Google Meet, Otter works on iOS, Android, and Zoom. And, it’s available in all the company’s different pricing plans. With a free plan, you get 600 minutes of transcribing with each recording having a maximum length of 40 minutes.

Paid plans offer more recording time and length maximums. They give you additional features like the ability to import audio and video, advanced export and search functions, and the capability to be used during live events.

The cross-platform product can be used anywhere, which means you can use the AI transcribing assistant on your phone. So, if you’re a student or journalist trying to record an interview, you can use the mobile app to record the conversation. In the app’s dashboard, you can view all your recorded transcriptions and those shared with you.

The company’s target market is the business and enterprise meeting market, and people are definitely using it. “Today with remote work and distributed workforce, most of the meetings are happening on Zoom or Webex or Microsoft Teams. So, people are finding Otter really useful to improve their collaboration remotely,” said Liang.

Otter is simple enough to use. All you do is go to the Google Web Store to install the extension. You tap the Otter icon to open it and login or sign up for an account. Once you’re logged on, you just tap the Record button to begin recording. Then, the extension will do all the hard work for you.