DOCOMO to Partner with AI-powered Enterprise Meeting Note Provider Otter.ai in Japan

Jan 22, 2020 12:21 JST

Source: NTT DOCOMO

- Planned combination of instant transcription and translation capabilities will increase business productivity -

TOKYO, Jan 22, 2020 - (JCN Newswire) - NTT DOCOMO, INC. announced today that it has made an investment in Otter.ai, the US-based provider of the highly accurate AI-powered Otter Voice Meeting Notes live transcription application. The investment forms part of a business partnership aiming at supporting Otter.ai's expansion in Japan and was made through DOCOMO's fully owned subsidiary NTT DOCOMO Ventures, Inc. DOCOMO additionally revealed its plans to develop new services in collaboration with Mirai Translate, Inc., its AI-based translation service subsidiary, leveraging Otter.ai's AI-based meeting note-taker in order to offer more efficient translation solutions.

Otter Voice Meeting Notes generates searchable, sharable notes from the spoken content of meetings, lectures and presentations held in English; these combine audio, transcriptions, speaker identification, inline photos, and key phrases. The Otter mobile and web application has been used by well over one million people around the world. The Otter application automatically records sentences according to the context of a speech, even over long multi-party conversations, and can transcribe text with high accuracy in real-time. AI is used to identify and label speakers in meetings, and their conversations are accurately transcribed, significantly reducing the time required to produce reports or meeting minutes. In addition, users can search transcribed content by keyword and playback specific sections merely by selecting the text on the screen, making it easy to review the content of meetings and thereby improving productivity.

Utilizing DOCOMO's natural language processing technology, Mirai Translate offers highly precise machine translation between Japanese and English. This is one of DOCOMO's key initiatives in its quest to help people overcome language barriers in everyday communication.

DOCOMO plans to start to support the introduction of Otter.ai within Japanese companies during the fiscal year 2020. In addition, DOCOMO plans to develop advanced translation solutions capable of conveying the content of speeches as well as recognizing the identities of multiple speakers at a meeting or event. It will achieve this by integrating Otter.ai. with Mirai Translate, with the aim of improving the operating efficiency of Japanese companies with global operations, and encouraging work-style reform across them.

As a part of DOCOMO's collaboration with Otter.ai, the Otter Voice Meeting Notes application is being used on a trial basis in Berlitz Japan's English language classes in Japan in an initiative that commenced on January 8. In order for students to confirm and review the content of lessons, they use Otter to record and transcribe them; they are also able to click on sections of text and initiate voice playback of these. The aim of the trial is to verify the usefulness of Otter.ai in the study of English. DOCOMO, Otter.ai, and Berlitz plan to conduct further efficiency verifications and collaborate in the field of language education.

DOCOMO additionally plans to conduct demonstrations during the DOCOMO Open House 2020, which will take place in the Tokyo Big Sight exhibition complex in Tokyo on January 23 and 24, 2020. English language content will be transcribed by Otter.ai and then translated into Japanese in real-time using a machine translation engine jointly developed by Mirai Translate and DOCOMO.

Going forward, DOCOMO will continue to support the entry into the Japan market of overseas companies, leveraging its own cutting-edge services and technologies to develop new markets and services.

About NTT DOCOMO

NTT DOCOMO, Japan's leading mobile operator with over 79 million subscriptions, is one of the world's foremost contributors to 3G, 4G and 5G mobile network technologies. Beyond core communications services, DOCOMO is challenging new frontiers in collaboration with a growing number of entities ("+d" partners), creating exciting and convenient value-added services that change the way people live and work. Under a medium-term plan toward 2020 and beyond, DOCOMO is pioneering a leading-edge 5G network to facilitate innovative services that will amaze and inspire customers beyond their expectations. DOCOMO is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange (9437). https://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/english/.

About Mirai Translate Inc.

Mirai Translate, Inc. is a machine translation solution provider as one of NTT DOCOMO subsidiary. Mirai Translate offer Software as a Service (SaaS) "Mirai TranslatorTM" with a neural network machine translation (NMT) engine which has the same translation accuracy as the Japanese and English bilingual businessmen. This SaaS offer 25 language pairs and customized models for as legal and pharmaceutical industry, and has been widely patronized as a highly precise and highly secure cloud machine translation service for businesses.

About NTT DOCOMO Ventures

NTT DOCOMO Ventures, the NTT Group's corporate venture capital firm, aims to accelerate innovation for the creation of new services, disruptive technologies and innovative processes serving as a primary channel for startup companies and venture communities on behalf of the NTT Group, Japan's leading ICT service provider. We proactively enhance cooperation with exceptional entrepreneurs on a worldwide scale by providing capital from our corporate venture funds and vast business development opportunities with the NTT Group companies.

Source: NTT DOCOMO
Sectors: Artificial Intel [AI]