AI-powered transcription service Otter.ai is today announcing a complete overhaul of its platform, offering workers new intelligently generated in-meeting action items, alongside a centralized environment for all meeting transcriptions and notes.

Building on the launch of its Otter Assistant in August 2021, the new update aims to streamline communication further by continuing to use conversational AI to improve both the in-meeting and post-meeting experience.

The update consists of a new-look home feed, which now acts as a centralized hub for all meeting and post-meeting actions. Users can connect their Google or Microsoft Outlook calendars to Otter to keep track of upcoming meetings, use it to directly join meetings or schedule their Otter Assistant to join. Shared conversations, highlights and comments, and tagged action items will also all be accessible from the new home feed.

The new action items being launched by Otter include Automatic Outline (currently in beta for Otter Business users via the web browser), which uses AI to automatically create a meeting summary that is curated and displayed in the Outline panel, providing meeting attendees with an easily accessible overview of what was discussed.

Meeting Gems helps teams to turn meetings into actions by automatically capturing action items, decisions, and key moments from a meeting, which users can then add comments or questions to, or assign action items to individual team members via the Meeting Gems panel.

Finally, One-Click Screen Capture allows users to add a meeting slide, or any other image presented during a virtual meeting directly to the Otter notes for fast, easy, visual references for yourself and your team. This feature is only available when using Otter Assistant, which is now available for both Pro and Business users.

Sam Liang, cofounder and CEO of Otter.ai said that while the company has been foused on its transcription services, it's now looking to build on this foundation to make meetings more effective and improve how workers communicate in new hybrid and distributed working environments.

"People spend a lot of time in meetings, and they communicate a lot. But if meetings are not effective, people actually waste time. They don't get their action items and they don't end up solving any problems," he said.

While the company still plans to continue improving the accuracy of its transcription service, Liang said Otter's mission statement now reads: "We are redefining the future of communication to be more collaborative, accessible and productive for all."

Dave Michels, principal analyst at TalkingPointz said that as hybrid work becomes the norm for many teams, companies need to adapt in order to accommodate both in-office and remote workers.

"Otter is making genuine improvements to how we work by leveraging its transcription capabilities to provide accurate notetaking. Its newest release uses AI technology to enable teams to collaborate more efficiently before, during, and after the meeting - regardless of team member location, and facilitates turning meeting communication into action," he said.