Take the hassle out of note-taking with Otter.ai
- Mia Hatton
- Archive
- December 18, 2019
- Updated:
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How much time is spent taking and distributing minutes in your organisation? How often are your staff impacted by miscommunications, forgotten action points and lost meeting notes? All of these losses can be avoided when you use an AI tool to automatically generate searchable transcriptions of your meetings.
Prerequisites:
- An account with otter.ai gives you 600 minutes of transcription every month for free and allows you to share your transcriptions as .txt files.
- For 6000 minutes per month and advanced order export, you will need a premium plan from $99 annually.
- If you have meetings online, you will need a Zoom Pro account to integrate with Otter.ai.
Steps to success:
- In a face-to-face meeting, launch otter.ai in your browser or mobile app.
- Tap the 'Record' button to start recording your meeting.
- Give your meeting a title.
- Hit the stop button when finished. Otter.ai will notify you when your transcript is ready.
When your transcript is ready:
- Open the transcript and make any necessary edits or add highlights.
- Export the transcript using the menu icon, or share it via a link or email.
There is much more you can offload onto otter.ai. Once you've got started, you can sync it to your Zoom or Dropbox recordings, identify speakers and sync it to your calendar for automated titling of your meetings.
More quick wins
Now that you’ve seen how just how quick and easy it can be to infuse your business processes with AI, why not check out a few more of our quick win projects that might be relevant to your business? Get inspired, download our free 7 Quick Wins Projects guide - link no longer works and start winning with AI today.
FAQs
Why does note-taking matter in manufacturing?
In a manufacturing business, meetings happen across the full breadth of operations: production planning, quality reviews, supplier calls, customer technical discussions, management meetings. Each generates decisions, action points, and commitments that need to be captured accurately and acted on. When note-taking is done manually, in the meeting, by someone who is also trying to participate in the conversation, the quality of the record is inevitably compromised.
Otter.ai addresses this by transcribing and summarising meetings automatically — capturing what was said, who said it, and what was decided, without requiring anyone in the meeting to divide their attention between the conversation and the record-keeping. For manufacturing teams where meetings drive operational decisions, this is a practical productivity improvement.
What is the integration with operational workflows?
The value of meeting transcription is not just the record itself — it is what happens with the record. Action points captured in Otter.ai can be imported into project management tools, decision logs can be shared with people who were not in the meeting, and commitments made by suppliers or customers are documented in a form that is searchable and retrievable.
For a production manager following up on a supplier commitment about delivery timing, or a quality manager tracking whether an agreed corrective action was implemented, the meeting transcript is evidence that the commitment was made. That is a meaningful operational improvement over ‘I think we agreed X in that call last Tuesday.’
What is the broader productivity case?
About the Author
Budding data scientist with an entrepreneurial and science communication background.
