NTT DOCOMO announced that it has made an investment in Otter.ai, the US-based provider of the highly accurate AI-powered Otter Voice Meeting Notes live transcription application.
The investment forms part of a business partnership aiming at supporting Otter.ai's expansion in Japan, and was made through DOCOMO's fully owned subsidiary NTT DOCOMO Ventures. DOCOMO additionally revealed its plans to develop new services in collaboration with Mirai Translate, its AI-based translation service subsidiary, leveraging Otter.ai's AI- based meeting note taker in order to offer more efficient translation solutions.
Otter Voice Meeting Notes generates searchable, sharable notes from the spoken content of meetings, lectures and presentations held in English; these combine audio, transcriptions, speaker identification, inline photos, and key phrases. The Otter mobile and web application has been used by well over one million people around the world. The Otter application automatically records sentences according to the context of a speech, even over long multi-party conversations, and can transcribe text with high accuracy in real time. AI is used to identify and label speakers in meetings, and their conversations are accurately transcribed, significantly reducing the time required to produce reports or meeting minutes. In addition, users can search transcribed content by keyword and play back specific sections merely by selecting the text on the screen, making it easy to review the content of meetings and thereby improving productivity.
Utilizing DOCOMO's natural language processing technology, Mirai Translate offers highly precise machine translation between Japanese and English. This is one of DOCOMO's key initiatives in its quest to help people overcome language barriers in everyday communication.
DOCOMO plans to start to support the introduction of Otter.ai within Japanese companies during the fiscal year 2020.
