Otter now lets you search across your work apps — and it’s actually useful

Otter has been the go-to for meeting transcription and notes for a while now, but they’ve just rolled out something that might actually make me open the app outside of meetings.

Starting today, you can connect your Gmail, Google Drive, Notion, Jira, and Salesforce accounts to Otter and search across all of them — alongside your existing meeting data. That means instead of digging through five different apps to find that one email thread or a specific line in a project ticket, you can just ask Otter. Or, more precisely, type a query and let it surface results from whatever you’ve connected.

The obvious comparison is to tools like Glean or even Google’s own Workspace search, but Otter’s angle here is context. Because it already knows your meetings, it can tie a Slack message about a deadline to the Jira ticket mentioned in a call transcript. That kind of cross-referencing is where this gets interesting.

What I like is that they’re starting with the apps people actually use daily. Gmail and Drive are no-brainers. Notion and Jira cover the documentation and project management bases. Salesforce is the odd one out for my workflow, but I know plenty of teams live in it. The missing piece right now is Microsoft ecosystem support — Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, and Slack — but Otter says those are coming soon. Frankly, without Slack and Teams, this feels incomplete for most companies. But it’s a solid first batch.

I’ve tested the search a bit, and it’s fast. Results are grouped by source, so you can see what came from a meeting versus what’s from a Notion doc. The relevance ranking seems decent, though I’m curious how well it handles ambiguous queries. Searching for “budget” across Gmail, Drive, and Jira is going to return a lot of noise. But for specific things — “Q2 planning doc from March” or “the Jira ticket about the login bug” — it works surprisingly well.

This is a smart move for Otter. They’ve been sitting on a goldmine of meeting data, and now they’re expanding into a broader enterprise search play. It’s not a new idea — enterprise search has been tried by a dozen vendors and mostly failed because it’s hard to get right. But Otter has a head start with the meeting context, and if they nail the integrations, this could become a sticky feature that keeps people in their ecosystem.

My only real concern is privacy. You’re giving Otter access to your email, documents, and project management data. They say all data stays within your workspace and is encrypted, but I’d want to see more details on how they handle access controls and data retention. Enterprise buyers will definitely ask.

Still, for a tool that started as a simple meeting note-taker, this is a bold and welcome expansion. I’ll be keeping an eye on the Slack and Teams rollout.