The new Otter feature allows users to search across their enterprise tools

AI-powered meeting note-taking apps have realized that taking meetings and providing summaries alone is not enough to justify their business models and evaluations. They now want to serve as a complete workspace where users bring in data from different sources, search through it all, and make decisions about their business. Following note-taking tools like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, and Fathom, Otter is now launching enterprise research by acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. This means it can connect to and pull data from external applications and services using a common standard that AI tools are quickly adopting.

Otter has been around for nearly a decade, but it has taken steps toward becoming an enterprise productivity tool in the past few months. Last October, the company launched a way for organizations to create custom MCPs to access Otter data outside of the app. The company’s final step concerns entering external data into the application.

With this launch, users can connect their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query that data as well as existing meeting data. The company said it will soon allow connections with Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Slack. Not only can users search for data via these tools, but they can also push meeting summaries to Notion or draft a Gmail message.

The company said it has also redesigned its AI assistant to be constantly present across the entire interface, so users can ask questions at any time. The assistant can understand the context of the screen, such as a specific meeting or channel, and answer questions accordingly.

Meanwhile, most note takers are following Granola’s lead and allowing meetings to be captured without a bot, i.e. recording meetings using the device’s audio system rather than having a bot join the call. Otter said it brought this feature to the Mac app late last year, and is now launching a Windows app with a similar feature.

There has been debate about taking meeting notes with bots (where a bot joins the meeting) or without bots. Otter CEO Sam Liang said the company’s enterprise clients prefer a meeting note taker to join the call.

“When we talk to enterprise customers, most of them actually prefer a note taker joining a Zoom meeting because it provides transparency. They also prefer sharing meeting notes with everyone in the meeting, so the note isn’t limited to one person,” he told TechCrunch over a phone call.

Otter said it has a data deduplication feature that prevents a swarm of bots from joining a meeting at once to avoid situations where there are more bots than humans on the call.

Last year, the company said it had 25 million users and annual recurring revenue of $100 million. While the company did not provide a new set of financial data, it said the platform now has 35 million users.