Otter.ai Inc., a popular artificial intelligence meeting transcription app, today launched a new AI-powered meeting assistant that can join meetings and take over the role of taking live notes, including making screen grabs and summarizing key points afterward.

The new service, called OtterPilot, essentially “automates meetings from start to finish,” said the company. It works by acting like a studious member of the business who joins the meeting and simply listens to the meeting and automatically gets the job done so that everyone else can pay attention to their own jobs.

Sam Liang, co-founder and chief executive of Otter.ai, said that he was inspired by Tesla’s Autopilot system and the power of AI to get things done in everyday life. “Similarly, we’ve seen the huge improvements in Otter’s AI capabilities, and now our OtterPilot promises to eliminate note-taking, save time and improve meeting productivity for our user’s next billion meetings,” he said.

Launched in 2016, Otter’s flagship is an automated AI-enabled transcriptions service that does away with arduous note-taking. The app itself takes notes in real time, where participants can watch it happen, and then edit the transcript afterward.

Otter can be connected to Microsoft or Google calendar for an upcoming meeting and the Otter service will automatically join virtual meetings and begin taking notes. While the meeting is going, attendees can view the live notes as they’re being generated, add their own comments, highlight key points and assign action items during the meeting.

According to the company, people waste a lot of time and attention writing notes and they’re not very efficient. Otter.ai claims using its system, note-taking can go more than 30 times faster by using AI to do the heavy lifting.

With the addition of OtterPilot, visuals used during the meeting – such as slides and images – will automatically be inserted into the notes at the appropriate points. This makes it much easier to search the notes and understand what was being discussed. The AI can identify which images are unique and important to the discussion by listening to the conversation and scanning the images themselves.

After the meeting was complete, OtterPilot will produce AI-generated summarizations of key meeting topics and emails them to the members involved in the meeting so that the people involved can easily recall and share information. That way nobody needs to dive back into the transcript just to remember what was discussed. That includes hyperlinks to key moments and slide captures done by the AI, which makes it easier to jump into the transcript should the exact verbiage be important.

The launch of this newest addition to the company’s service comes after the company announced that it has reached the significant milestone of transcribing more than 1 billion meetings.

Otter.ai offers a number of plans for access to its service starting with a free one for individuals to get started out with its service that allows 30 minutes of conversation and 300 minutes per month. The paid tiers, Pro and Business, are $17 and $30 per month per user and go from 90 minutes and four hours per conversation, respectively, and offer 1,200 and 6,000 minutes per month. All of the tiers offer access to AI transcription, summaries and image capture.

Image: Otter.ai