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Glenn Kaonang · · 6 min readBattle of the AI transcribers: Meeting.ai takes on Otter.ai
Speech-to-text technology has been around for a while, but breakthroughs in generative AI are intensifying the competition to perfect it like never before.
Suddenly, everyone seems to be claiming they offer AI-powered meeting transcription services.
Otter.ai, considered a leader in the space with over US$63 million in funds raised, launched a genAI-powered chat feature last year, touting it as superior to ChatGPT. Read.ai, which recently secured US$50 million, aims to evolve its AI solutions beyond note taking.
Image credit: Made by Tech in Asia using Midjourney
Yet this crowded AI transcription landscape didn’t deter Hokiman Kurniawan from launching Meeting.ai in 2023, an Indonesia-based startup that hasn’t raised any external funding at all but believes it can compete globally.
“Cocktail” of LLMs
In 2016, while still a student at the University of Indonesia, Kurniawan co-founded Bahasa.ai, which specialized in creating custom chatbots for local enterprises. He identified a significant demand for natural language processing tools tailored to the Indonesian language, which is spoken by more than 270 million people.
The startup secured a couple rounds of funding from investors like East Ventures and SMDV, the VC arm of Indonesian conglomerate Sinar Mas Group. It also attracted clients such as Bank Sinarmas, MyRepublic, and Kalbe Nutritionals.
Hokiman Kurniawan speaking on a panel at the Tech in Asia Conference 2024. / Photo credit: Tech in Asia
However, by 2022, Kurniawan felt that Bahasa.ai needed to pivot. “We realized by then that we had taken the business as far as we could and needed a new product with the potential to scale beyond Indonesia,” he tells Tech in Asia in a recent interview.
ChatGPT was publicly launched near the end of that year, sparking worldwide excitement over AI-powered tools. For local entrepreneurs like Kurniawan, this mainstreaming meant that they no longer needed to explain what AI is to their customers.
In July 2023, Kurniawan chose to use the recurring revenue from Bahasa.ai – which he says was in the “low millions of dollars” – to launch Meeting.ai. Bahasa.ai continues to operate and maintain services for its existing clients.
With speech recognition technology like OpenAI’s Whisper being readily available and open-sourced, it’s fairly easy for any tech-savvy individual to build a tool that can automatically transcribe human conversations.
See also: Mapping AI startups pushing SEA into the spotlight
The AI transcriber showdown
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The Indonesian startup claims it stands out in accuracy, particularly in conversations involving non-English speakers.
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