Sam Liang is making things easier for the creators of the NVIDIA AI Podcast — and just about every remote worker.
He’s the CEO and co-founder of Otter.ai, which uses AI to produce speech-to-text transcriptions in real time or from recording uploads. The platform has a range of capabilities, from differentiating between multiple people, to understanding accents, to parsing through various background noises.
And now, Otter.ai, an NVIDIA Inception member, is making live captioning possible on a variety of platforms, including Zoom, Skype and Microsoft Teams. Even Liang’s conversation with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz was captioned in real time over Skype.
This new capability has been enthusiastically received by remote workers — Liang says that Otter.ai has already transcribed tens of millions of meetings.
Liang envisions even more practical effects of Otter.ai’s live captions. The platform can already identify keywords. Soon he thinks it’ll be recognizing action items, helping manage agendas and providing notifications.
Key Points From This Episode:
- Otter.ai was founded in 2016 and is Liang’s second startup, after Alohar, a company focused on mobile behavior services. Once Alohar was acquired, Liang reflected that he needed better tools to help transcribe and share meetings, inspiring him to found Otter.ai.
- The company’s AI model was built from scratch. Although Siri and Alexa predate it, Otter.ai needed to comprehend multiple voices that could overlap and vary in accents — a different, more complex task than understanding and responding to just one voice.
Tweetables:
“Though it’s been growing steadily before COVID, people have been using Otter on their laptop or on iOS or Android devices … you can use it anywhere.” — Sam Liang [7:32]
“Otter is your new meeting assistant. People will have the peace of mind that they don’t have to write down everything themselves.” — Sam Liang [22:07]
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