Otter, the notetaker many offices already add to their video calls, has added two things. Before a meeting, it writes a short brief from your earlier calls and the apps you have connected to it. During the meeting, it gives one person private suggestions based on what is being said. The brief is on all paid plans. Live Assist is for enterprise customers now and is meant to reach every paid user within weeks.
Neither half is new, and that is the point
Otter is joining a race. Fireflies, a rival notetaker, has had a Live Assist of its own since late 2025, and Granola, Fireflies and Read AI all send a brief before a call. When three or four products offer the same thing, it stops being a feature and becomes something people simply expect, the way spell check did. Within a year or two, a client or a supplier on the other side of a video call will probably arrive with a brief and a coach, whether or not they pay for one themselves.
Why the newest person gains most
What makes a veteran good in a meeting is mostly memory. They remember what was agreed last time, who raised the pricing worry, and which question made the client go quiet. A new hire has none of that, and until now the only way to get it was to read old emails and ask around.
A brief gives the newcomer that memory in a minute. The live coach gives it again at the moment it is needed, when the client mentions a delivery that went wrong in March. That is why the support-centre result is the right guide. The tool there spread the habits of the best agents, so the weakest gained a lot and the strongest gained little. The same will probably hold here: a seasoned account manager already carries the history in her head, and the one who started on Monday does not.
Here is what it looks like in practice. A mid-sized distributor hands a departing salesperson's 40 customers to someone new. Before each call, the newcomer opens a brief that lists what was promised, what is still open and what the customer complained about. If that person takes ten client calls a week and spends 15 minutes before each one digging through old notes, the brief returns about two and a half hours a week. The calls also go better, because the customer does not have to repeat the whole story.
What to do with it
The benefit comes with a question of consent. Otter is defending a class action lawsuit that says it recorded people who had not agreed to it, and California requires everyone on a call to consent to being recorded. Otter's bot appears in the meeting window, which at least tells people it is there. Some newer notetakers leave out the visible bot, so it is worth telling people yourself when a tool is listening.
If you manage a team and can only afford a few licences, give them to your newest people before your most senior ones. The veterans will get a little from a coach. The new hires will get what took the veterans years to learn.