(Compare against your TV transcription to see the difference.) Noticeably, it already understands context so you can watch it going back on itself, improving sentences and syntax after its first pass. Otter isn't perfect but it's good enough to save us a lot of time and effort, and, having an AI brain, it should improve over time. Even today with enormous compute capacity to throw at the problem, most speech software remains shonky and sensitive. Speech is a challenge that computing luminaries such as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore have long recognised as one of the great remaining challenges for digital technology. While most of us will simply think ‘nice, will save me an hour', the underlying tech is unfathomably deep. If you've heard of Otter, you've probably seen it referred to as a transcription service but there's a tad more to it: it's searchable, you can pin associated content, comment, highlight and bookmark. Or, looked at another ways, you could say that Otter is like the animal it's named after: 'one of the smartest animals with a high IQ and a very good memory … social, friendly and it gives you a warm feeling', as Liang puts it. It strikes me that Otter can have a similar function: as a function as useful as the blue dot or the spellchecker. Today, that feature is as ubiquitous as birdsong it was even picked out by Steve Jobs who demoed it as the only app shown at the iPhone launch. Liang has an odd claim to fame: he led the project that developed the blue dot on Google Maps so we can see where we are.

The pair had previously worked together at a startup Alohar Mobile, co-founded and led by Liang and later acquired by Alibaba and respectively had served at Google and Yahoo. So, Otter is a four-year-old Silicon Valley (Los Altos) startup that Liang founded with colleague Yun Fu.

I recently joined a Zoom call where Otter.ai CEO Sam Liang took me through the service and the thinking behind it. Look closely and you can see that that service is provided by a product called Otter. If you have a premium subscription with Zoom, the conferencing service provides a neat add-on: a voice conversation notes generator that helps replenish our memory banks when folks have ‘Zoomed out' because of the New Normal of conducting back-to-back meetings online.

Otter voice notes for zoom