Voice transcription service Otter.ai has found itself on the wrong end of a lawsuit that claims it trains its speech recognition tech without securing permission to do so.
A complaint [PDF] filed last week on behalf of plaintiff Justin Brewer, points out that the company offers a service called the “Otter Notetaker” that records participants in Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams, to transcribe whatever is spoken and produce meeting summaries.
The suit points out that Otter’s privacy policy states that the company uses meeting participants’ voices to train its speech recognition AI, while the company’s Privacy & Security FAQ does likewise.
Otter accountholders should therefore know their every utterance in an online meeting recorded by NoteTaker helps to improve the company’s AI.
But the suit notes Otter records all utterances in a meeting – those made by accountholders and those made by meeting participants who do not have an Otter account.
Otter’s services never ask those guests for consent to have their voices recorded or fed into a machine learning model, the complaint claims.
Otter recently celebrated reaching $100 million annual revenue. The lawsuit suggests Otter obtains financial benefits from this practice.
Lead plaintiff Justin Brewer also claims Otter violated his privacy rights, an important element of the suit as it claims the company’s use of meeting guests’ voices falls on the wrong side of the USA’s federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and several California laws.
The filing anticipates a defence in which Otter says its accountholders should inform guests about its use of data before meetings.
The plaintiffs are having none of that.
“Otter tries to shift responsibility, outsourcing its legal obligations to its accountholders, rather than seeking permission and consent from the individuals Otter records, as required by law,” the filing states.
The law firms mentioned in the complaint hope to start a class action and say over 100 plaintiffs share the same gripe as Brewer.
The complaint argues that the case is both viable and deserves to be heard in the District Court for the Northern District of California.
The Register sought comment from Otter and will update this story if we receive a substantive reply. ®