Sam Liang, chief executive and co-founder of artificial intelligence transcription start-up Otter.ai, has a plan to save us all from endless, boring meetings. His company is working on personalised AI avatars that will one day be able to attend online meetings on their owner’s behalf. 

Founded in 2016 and based in Mountain View, California, Otter.ai has evolved from a simple voice-to-text transcription service to offer automatic recordings of live events, meeting summaries and content searches. Liang says he envisages Otter as a productivity tool that can improve attention and save everyone time. It built its speech recognition and summary service in-house and uses third-party large language model partners to provide an AI chatbot.

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