Otter's new AI meeting agent can speak up in calls

For years, Otter has been that silent bot sitting in the corner of your Zoom calls, quietly taking notes while everyone else talks.

Now, it wants to unmute itself.

Otter is rolling out three new AI agents designed to handle tasks during and after meetings. The headliner is the Otter Meeting Agent, a voice-activated assistant that can actually speak up and answer questions out loud during live calls.

Talking to your company memory

Otter is pitching the Meeting Agent as a major evolution over its older in-meeting chatbot. While the previous tool mostly lived in a text box taking notes and summarizing transcripts, the new agent relies on natural voice interaction.

During a meeting, anyone can ask the agent a question out loud. The bot will search through the company's historical meeting database to find the answer and speak it back to the room.

Beyond answering historical queries, users can tell it to schedule upcoming meetings or draft follow-up emails on the fly. The agent is already live on Zoom and rolling out incrementally to all Otter.ai users, with Microsoft Teams and Google Meet support scheduled to arrive in the coming weeks.

Pitching without humans

Otter is also targeting sales teams with two other specialized agents.

The Sales Agent acts like an in-ear coach during virtual calls, feeding live guidance to sales reps to help them handle objections and close deals. It works across all major video platforms and is available to Otter enterprise sales clients.

Then there is the Sales Development Representative (SDR) Agent. Otter says this bot can autonomously run product demos without any human intervention at all. It is currently live on Otter's website, though interested companies have to reach out directly to buy it. Otter added that more agents for marketing and recruiting are on the roadmap.

Why it matters

Turning sprawling meeting transcripts into an interactive voice assistant makes a lot of practical sense. Instead of digging through months of notes to see what was agreed upon last quarter, you can just ask the room's AI assistant.

Still, having an AI speak aloud during high-stakes business meetings is risky. If the bot misinterprets a question or pulls obsolete figures from an old call, it could derail the discussion fast.

For Otter, this push feels like a necessary defense mechanism. Zoom, Microsoft, and Google are all packing their native platforms with generative AI features, threatening to make standalone transcription tools obsolete. By transforming from a passive transcriber into an active participant that can even run sales demos, Otter is trying hard to prove it belongs in the enterprise stack.