Otter has added a new Work mode to its AI Chat assistant, expanding the range of tasks it can carry out before and after meetings.
It’s part of a wider drive by Otter — which received $320 million in funding last week — to move beyond meeting transcription and into automating tasks and workflows.
The Work interface, announced Tuesday, is accessible in the AI Chat prompt box, alongside the Chat option. While Chat allows users to ask questions, generate content, and retrieve information, Work is aimed at multi-step actions, Otter said. It’s a similar approach to other AI assistants, such as Claude and ChatGPT, that separate simpler chat functionality from newer agentic capabilities.
Prior to a meeting, Otter users can prompt Work to generate briefing documents based on information collated from previous calls and data from connected applications. After a meeting ends, the AI assistant can draft emails, generate documents — including Word and Notion docs, PDFs, and interactive web pages — and update Salesforce records.
The AI assistant requires human approval before completing tasks, an Otter spokesperson said.
The capabilities expand on functions already available with AI Chat’s existing Advanced mode. Otter will now remove the Express and Advanced options from the AI Chat interface.
Work mode is available now to all paid Otter users. There are no usage limits, Otter said — this differs from the Chat mode, which allocates a certain number of queries each month depending on a customer’s payment plan.
The feature updates reflect how meeting note taking is rapidly moving from data capture to workflow automation, said Irwin Lazar, principal analyst at Metrigy. “That is, vendors are delivering solutions that allow meeting notes to be actionable, based on context both from within meetings, as well as from other connected platforms,” he said.
Lazar pointed to similar functionality emerging in other meeting systems such as Microsoft’s facilitator in Teams and Cisco’s Webex meeting agent.
The vast majority (91%) of business users want meeting note-takers to access and act on context from outside a meeting, according to a global study of 403 organizations in Metrigy’s “Workplace Collaboration & Employee Experience: 2027” report.
In addition to the Work mode, Otter announced that its Live Assist feature is now available to enterprise customers, and will expand access to all paid Otter accounts in the coming weeks. Live Assist, announced in April, provides private guidance to a user during a call, such as suggesting questions and tracking meeting “objectives.”
“I see this kind of widget assist a lot in external-facing customer support roles, but for internal productivity meetings, this is quite unique,” said Thomas Randall, a research director at Infotech.
However he said that Otter faces from other meeting software vendors which are also integrating AI capabilities into their platforms. “So I don’t see Otter becoming a center of work, though its new functionality will be of great assistance to pre-existing users,” said Randall.
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