Google Meet Gets Live Transcription Feature From Otter.ai

Otter.ai, a transcription service that uses artificial intelligence rather than human transcribers, has arrived on Google Meet as an alternative to Google's own captions feature. Otter already offers its transcription tech on Zoom, the competing video conferencing software, in addition to its own mobile apps and website.

Put simply, Otter.ai is an app that listens to you talk and transcribes it as text using artificial intelligence. The tool is fairly sophisticated, however, with features such as recognizing different speakers and enabling users to listen to the recorded audio at any given spot in a transcription by clicking on a word.

The platform has arrived on Google Meet in the form of a Chrome extension, which is now available in the Chrome Web Store. Once installed, users can fire up a Google Meet conference and then click on the Otter.ai extension to pull up a side panel in which the transcription is showed in real time.

The side panel includes some controls, such as clicking a button to open the transcription up in the full-screen view, saving the transcription document, and sharing it with other people. There are multiple benefits to such functionality, of course.

Transcripts enable users to scroll back through the conversation to reference something they may have forgotten, to share the conversation with others who may not have been able to participate, and to keep a record of business that takes place in the form of live video chats.