Addendum: I Otter Clear Something Up

My original post (below) was rather hasty and harsh.  I've been using Otter.ai for a few weeks now for its primary purpose: transcripts and summaries of online meetings. In this context it is EXCELLENT! For the most part it is able to clearly understand and accurately transcribe human voice.  It also does really good summaries under headings that the AI is able to discern from the patterns of interaction that suggest changes of topic and transitions.  Pretty clever stuff.  I also captures the screen content so that you can see what slide was being shared during each section of discussion (though Otter doesn't need slide changes to recognize transition). 

All in all, Otter.ai is a fantastic tool that saves a lot of note-taking and allows you to focus entirely on the discussion at hand and not keeping up with notes.  So much so that I have taken the annual subscription. Feel free to continue to my slightly unfair original assessment: it does reasonably criticize Otter's inability to transcribe live presentations where the sound quality may be low and when using a laptop or phone's external microphone.

We're now into double figures on the number of AI tools tested, and for the first time we have encountered a dud.  I am sure it will get better and that a potential benefit may arrive, but for now otter.ai is not ready for prime time. Monty Python fans may recognize the tweaked headline that comes from the Hungarian Phrasebook sketch. That very unhelpful eponymous phrasebook came to mind as I watched Otter "take notes" for me at the ANA Brand Masters Conference.

In theory, the purpose of Otter.ai is to use its conversational language recognition tool to take notes in meetings, summarize them, share them among participants etc.  The reality, at least for me, was an incomprehensible and often hilarious set of transcripts.

I didn't make a note of which session I was recording figuring that I wouldn't need to, given that the tools was recording the introduction to the speaker and topic.  But so incomprehensible was the transcript that I honestly couldn't tell!

Below are some examples of transcripts and I don't need to protect the presenters as no-one will recognize the topic, let alone the speaker. Bear in mind that the benefit of Artificial Intelligence is supposed to be a learned understanding of context. i.e. The presentation is on marketing and brands so if a word is muffled it's more likely to be "brand" than "bronze". So, here are a few examples:

"School smokey skin area we ran out of homelessness and iconic locations like Penn Station which was not about us but old man building subway stations."

"...so, you were supposed to receive this video Prosecutors are protected as chefs on finding the right compassion"

"That creates a new brand new business if any of those things they didn't did."


So, other than for amusement, I won't be using otter.ai for note taking/sharing any time soon. But I doubt it will be long before the language understanding will improve.