Participated · Series A · Feb 2018

Otter (formerly AISense) provides AI-powered speech-to-text transcription that turns conversations and meetings into searchable text and identifies who is speaking. The platform supports both consumer and enterprise customers and integrates with partners such as Dropbox and Zoom in the U.S. Otter began operating in 2018 and has been piloting use cases in Japan, including Berlitz's online English classes where students can search lesson recordings. The company’s Otter Voice Meeting Notes app helps users find portions of recordings without manual review. Otter is expanding into Japan through a partnership with NTT DOCOMO to integrate its transcription tech into DOCOMO’s Mirai Translation service. Financially, Otter closed a $10 million funding round and, according to the article, has raised $23 million since it was founded. Otter is a voice-transcription product built by AISense that records conversations on iOS, Android and web, automatically transcribes them, and syncs audio with searchable text. The company built its entire speech-recognition stack in-house and uses diarization and voice prints to separate and identify multiple speakers. Transcripts are stored encrypted in the cloud and the app supports file uploads, sharing, and a tag-cloud UI to jump to frequently used words. AISense has licensed its transcription technology to Zoom but says its immediate monetization focus is not licensing; it plans an enterprise version with more controls and a premium tier for consumers. A future release is intended to support recording phone calls. The team is led by Sam Liang and includes engineers from Google, Facebook, Nuance, Yahoo and researchers from Stanford, Duke, MIT and Cambridge.