Otter.ai raises $50 million for AI transcription
AI transcription startup Otter.ai today proclaimed it’s raised $50 million during a series B spherical that has $10 million in convertible notes
VentureBeat: AI transcription startup Otter.ai today proclaimed it’s raised $50 million during a series B spherical that has $10 million in convertible notes and was light-emitting diode by Spectrum Equity. With the funds, the corporate plans to triple its count over the following year because it hires across its AI, deep learning, linguistic communication processing, frontend and backend engineering, and leadership teams.
There’s no shortage of competition in the audio transcription market, which is calculable to be price at $31.82 billion by 2025. however, Otter.ai — once AISense — the startup behind speech-to-text service Otter, has managed to carve out a niche for itself within the 5 years since its founding. The company’s revenue skyrocketed 800% in 2020 as Otter saw adoption in additional than 230 countries. and also the company says it’s transcribed over a hundred million meetings, spanning three billion minutes to date.
Otter.ai was based by chief operating officer guided-missile Liang and VP of engineering Yun Fu in 2016. Liang light-emitting diode the Google locations team that developed the “blue dot” on the Google Maps app and launched mobile startup Aloha, which was nonheritable by Alibaba in 2013.
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Otter.ai’s core technology, which was developed by a team hailing from Google, Yahoo, Facebook, MIT, Stanford, Duke, and Cambridge, is optimized for conversations. It can distinguish between speakers using a technique called diarization, generating a unique print for each person’s voice. Transcriptions are processed in the cloud and made available from the web, in Dropbox, or in Otter.ai’s mobile app for iOS and Android devices. There, they can be searched, copied and pasted, scrolled through, edited, and shared with a word cloud at the top of each recording that tracks most-used terms.
“Otter’s high accuracy is a result of the algorithms that enable the app to learn,’” a spokesperson told VentureBeat. “These were especially focused in the early days on English speakers with a range of accents — regional at intervals the U.S. and also optimized to handle accents like Liang’s and also the billions of English speakers on the planet. Liang had continually been pissed off that accents weren’t understood by linguistic communication process systems.”
Otter.ai competes with Microsoft 365, which may host live events with AI-powered options akin to identity verification of attendees and autonomous speech-to-text conversion, similarly as meeting transcription tools from Cisco and startups Voicera, Verbit, Trint, Simon Says, and Scribie. however, Otter.ai seeks to differentiate its service with competitive pricing. Otter professional starts at $8.33 per month, creating it solely slightly pricier than the company’s business tier, which prices $20 per month. Otter.ai additionally offers a free plan, with 600 minutes of transcription per month and unlimited cloud storage.
Otter.ai recently brought Otter to the education market with Otter for Education, which lets instructors management access recorded transcripts and enhances student incapacity services and accessibility technical chronologies. Otter.ai additional recently launched Otter for Teams, a subscription resolution designed to accommodate the requirements of little and medium-sized businesses with account management, provisioning, reporting, and alternative features. This summer, Otter.ai debuted Otter for Events, a service that uses Otter’s linguistic communication process tech to capture event conversations and switch them into transcripts in real-time.
Otter.ai offers plugins for Zoom and Google Meet that permit participants to induce a live captioning of the meeting, followed by a transcript. It’s a part of Otter Live Notes, Otter.ai’s giving that lets participants open a transcript directly from a videoconference or when a meeting. Otter Live Notes permits users to access a number of equivalent period options out there in Otter Voice Meeting Notes, which may be launched directly from a videoconferencing platform.
The growing list of organizations that have piloted or are actively victimization Otter includes California State University, Columbia University, and also the statesman Business School. Otter.ai claims to own variant users and expects that the pandemic can still fuel growth.
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“It is turning into additional clear by the day that remote and hybrid operating are trends that are here to stay,” Lian told VentureBeat via email. “Consequently, we want to rethink conferences so as to create them more productive for everybody collaborating during this new, virtual world with productivity and collaboration tools.”
Beyond Spectrum, Horizons Ventures, trader Associates, GGV Ventures, and trader Dragon Fund participated in Otter.ai’s latest funding round. It brings the Lost Altos, California-based company’s total raised to date to over $63 million.