CEO Tech Talk: How Otter.ai Uses Artificial Intelligence To Automatically Transcribe Speech To Text

Otter CEO and Silicon Valley-based serial entrepreneur Sam Liang created a cloud-based artificial intelligence engine to power its automated speech to text transcription service. In my 25-plus-year career--and counting!--as a journalist, I've done thousands of interviews and attended even more meetings, either face to face or over the phone which, for lots of them, I had to manually transcribe the conversations to make sure that I got my interlocutors' comments right--a chore that I dreaded. So when my friend Marie Domingo introduced me to Otter.ai at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco last fall--she was handling their public relations at that time--I was, of course, curious to know more about how this mobile app works but highly skeptical that it would actually help me. After more than six months using the free version of the service that includes 600 minutes of free transcriptions per month, Otter.ai Not only does the app (for iOS and Android) do an excellent job in transcribing my live interviews and meetings from speech to text with great accuracy--and letting me focus on the actual conversations rather than taking notes verbatim--but it made the notes totally searchable which is an amazing time saver when I'm looking for specific keywords.