AI meeting note taker apps have realized that transcribing meetings and simply providing summaries is not enough to justify their business models and pricing. They now want to serve as a complete workspace where users bring in data from a variety of sources, search through it all, and make decisions about their business. Following notables like Read AI, Fireflies.ai, and Fathom, Otter is now starting enterprise search by acting as a Model Context Protocol (MCP) client. This means it can connect and pull data from outside apps and services using a common standard that AI tools are increasingly adopting.

Otter has been around for almost a decade now, but it’s been making strides to become an enterprise productivity tool in the past few months. Last October, the company launched a way for organizations to create custom MCPs to access Otter data outside of the app. The company’s latest move is all about bringing outside data into the app.

With this launch, users can connect their Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts and query that data along with existing meeting data. The company said it will soon allow connections with Microsoft Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and Slack. Users can not only search for data in these tools, but also draft a meeting summary or a Gmail message.

The company said it has redesigned its AI assistant to be constantly present throughout the interface, so users can ask questions at any time. The assistant can understand the context of the screen, such as a particular meeting or channel, and answer questions accordingly.

Meanwhile, most note-takers are following Granola’s lead and allowing botless meeting capture — recording meetings using the device’s system audio instead of having a bot join the call. Otter said it brought the feature to the Mac app late last year, and is now launching a Windows app with the same feature.

There has been discussion about taking meeting notes with bots (where a bot joins the meeting) or without bots. Otter CEO Sam Liang said the company’s enterprise customers prefer when a meeting note-taker joins the call.

“When we talk to enterprise users, most of them actually prefer a note taker that joins a Zoom meeting because it provides transparency. They also prefer to share meeting notes with all meeting participants, so that the notes are not limited to just one person,” he told TechCrunch on a call.

Otter said it has a deduplication feature that prevents a multitude of bots from joining a meeting at the same time to avoid situations where there are more bots than humans on a call.

Last year, the company said it 25 million users and $100 million in annual recurring revenue. While the company did not provide a new set of financials, it said the platform now has 35 million users.