We’re living in a time where being confined to a space at home is deemed normal. With everything from office meetings to events and from personal tutoring to online classes becoming virtual, people working remotely or students studying at home find it tougher to pay attention and take notes during these online video sessions.
To break the hassle, a new automated transcription service called Otter.ai or Otter Live Video Meeting Notes makes life easier by directly transcribing Zoom meetings immediately without any disturbance.
A blog post shared the feature quietly on their official website earlier this month but it has been available for a while.
One can also transcribe recordings of previously recorded Zoom meetings through it.
Regardless, the live transcription feature makes the process quicker and also makes editing and highlighting valuable information easier while it is still fresh in your mind.
To use these features, one simply need the Zoom’s Pro tier subscription or higher. Apart from this, one would also need an Otter for Teams subscription which normally costs about $20 per user per month but the service is currently offering a 2-month free trial by using the code COVID19OTTER.
Setting up Live Video Meeting Notes for Zoom
A simple one-time process needs to be followed for setting up this feature:
1. The Zoom administrator needs to pre-approve Otter in Zoom Marketplace and allow live streaming in Zoom
2. The Zoom meeting hosts need to allow live streaming in Zoom and connect Otter to Zoom
Using the Live Video Meeting Notes for Zoom
1. Start live transcription automatically
First, you need to start a meeting with the Zoom account connected with Otter.
Next, a red Live indication will be seen on the top left side of the Zoom window. This indicates that Otter has started live transcribing the meeting automatically.
2. Access Live Transcript
To open a live interactive transcript directly from Zoom to follow along and read at your own pace, you as the participant need to join a Zoom meeting.
Next, click on the red Live indicator and click View Stream on Otter.ai Live Transcript in the dropdown.
This should open your Live transcript in a browser window and now you can follow along or scroll down to read at your own pace.
3. Collaboratively taking notes
Participants who are logged into Otter can even highlight text, drop comments and add photos collaboratively to create notes of the meeting that everyone can review and share.
4. Manually stop live transcription
To switch off transcribing for certain meetings, simply click the red LIVE indicator and click Stop Live Stream in the dropdown.
For a much more detailed process, you can see the Otter.ai website.
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