Otter

Otter Notes Sync (Otter.ai email → projects//docs/meetings/)

On-demand sync of Otter.ai meeting summaries into per-project meeting archives. The Otter → /otter counterpart of Tactiq → /tactiq. Where Tactiq saves Google Docs to Drive, Otter shares meetings as email: for every recorded meeting, no-reply@otter.ai sends a Meeting Summary for <title> message containing the AI summary and a few action items.

Important — Otter emails are summaries, not transcripts. The email carries the AI-written summary plus the first ~3 action items. The full transcript stays in the Otter web app behind auth-gated links; it is not in the email and cannot be fetched here. So each saved file is the summary + inlined action items, and records how many action items Otter listed vs how many the email showed. If a meeting was also recorded by Tactiq, prefer /tactiq for that one (full verbatim transcript) — see "Meetings with both Otter and Tactiq" below.

What this skill does

1. Lists Meeting Summary for … emails from no-reply@otter.ai via the Gmail MCP tools.
2. Skips any already recorded in .otter_processed.json or already saved on disk.
3. Fetches each thread, saves the raw JSON, and parses summary / action items / date / title.
4. Routes the meeting to a project via the ## Meetings block in each project's CLAUDE.md (the same block /tactiq uses).
5. Saves to projects/<slug>/docs/meetings/YYYY-MM-DD-<title-slug>.md.
6. Records the Gmail message ID in .otter_processed.json (workspace root) for idempotent re-runs.
7. Anything unmatched goes to inbox/meetings/ for manual triage.

Inputs

Invoked with no required args. Optional:

• A date range (/otter since 2026-07-01, last 14 days). Default: all unprocessed. Map to a Gmail newer_than: / after: clause.
• A project slug (/otter judgeGPT) to restrict routing.

Prerequisites

• The Gmail MCP server must be connected (the mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__* tools). Interactively-authenticated MCP servers can be absent in headless/cron runs — this skill is meant to be run interactively, like /tactiq.
• Helper script: research-kit/skills/otter/otter_helpers.py (email parser + meeting-file renderer). It never touches the network — fetching is done by the model via the Gmail tools; the helper only parses a file the caller saved.

Step 1 — list Otter summary emails

Use mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__search_threads with:

from:no-reply@otter.ai subject:"Meeting Summary for"

Append the user's date filter if given (e.g. newer_than:14d). Otter also sends Your upcoming meetings digests from the same address — the subject:"Meeting Summary for" clause excludes them. Each result's subject is Meeting Summary for <title>; id is the Gmail message/thread ID.

If the first run pulls a long backlog, confirm with the user before processing more than ~10.

Step 2 — load dedup state

Read .otter_processed.json from the workspace root:

{
  "processed": {
    "<gmail_message_id>": {
      "saved_to": "projects/<slug>/docs/meetings/<file>.md",
      "title": "<meeting title>",
      "date": "YYYY-MM-DD",
      "processed_at": "ISO8601"
    }
  },
  "ignored": {
    "<gmail_message_id>": { "title": "…", "reason": "…", "ignored_at": "ISO8601" }
  }
}

Skip any ID in processed or ignored. Missing/corrupt → treat as {"processed": {}, "ignored": {}} and warn.

Also reconcile against saved files — the cache is per-machine and untracked, so a fresh checkout has no cache even though the meeting files are committed:

python3 "$SKILL_DIR/otter_helpers.py" scan-ids .   # {otter_id: path} for every saved Otter meeting

Treat a message as processed if its ID is in the cache or in this scan. This is what prevents -2 duplicates when the cache is absent. Optionally backfill scan-only IDs into .otter_processed.json.

Only the user populates ignored (e.g. /otter ignore <message_id> for a test recording or a non-project call). Never auto-populate it.

Step 3 — fetch each unprocessed email

Call mcp__claude_ai_Gmail__get_thread with messageFormat: FULL_CONTENT. Otter emails are large (~80–90k chars); the tool usually saves the result to a file and prints its path instead of returning it inline. Use that file path directly as the parser's src. If the result is returned inline, write the JSON to /tmp/otter/<message_id>.json yourself and use that.

Either way the parser reads the raw get_thread JSON ({id, messages:[…]}) and picks the Otter message on its own — no pre-processing needed.

Step 4 — parse

python3 "$SKILL_DIR/otter_helpers.py" parse /path/to/thread.json

Returns JSON: title, date (YYYY-MM-DD), duration, summary, action_items (list), action_items_total (int — from "See N action items →"), participants (best-effort: the owners named on action items), otter_id (Gmail message id).

Notes on the fields:

• title comes from the subject (Meeting Summary for <title>) — reliable.
• date is the meeting date: month/day from the email body's <Mon DD>, <time>, <N> min line, year from the email's Date. Falls back to the email date.
• participants is only the action-item owners — Otter emails have no attendee list. Expect it to be partial; pass --attendees to save to correct it (names are visible in the summary text, e.g. "X and Y discussed …").

Step 5 — route to a project

Iterate projects/*/CLAUDE.md for a ## Meetings block (the same block /tactiq reads):

## Meetings

```yaml
match:
  - title_contains: ["procurement", "fiscal enforcement"]
  - attendee_name: ["Andrei Leite", "Lucas Mariani"]
```

Matching rules:

• title_contains — case-insensitive substring against the Otter meeting title. This is the reliable signal for Otter (the title is exact).
• attendee_name — case-insensitive match against the parsed participants and the summary + action_items text (Otter has no attendee list, so match against the notes text, not just participants).
• A project matches if any rule matches. Multiple matches → ask the user.
• /otter <slug> restricts routing to those slugs.
• No match → save to inbox/meetings/ and surface it so the user can add a rule.

Step 6 — save the file

Do not hand-write the markdown — the save subcommand is the single source of truth for the format.

Destination: projects/<slug>/docs/meetings/YYYY-MM-DD-<title-slug>.md (unmatched → inbox/meetings/…). Slug rules: lowercase, ASCII-fold, non-alphanumeric → -, collapse repeats, trim, ~50 chars.

python3 "$SKILL_DIR/otter_helpers.py" save \
  /path/to/thread.json <gmail_message_id> \
  projects/<slug>/docs/meetings/YYYY-MM-DD-<title-slug>.md

Pass - as the message id to read it from the JSON. Pass --attendees "Name One,Name Two" to set the frontmatter attendee list from the summary text. The subcommand appends -2, -3, … on collision and prints the final path. Record that path in .otter_processed.json.

Rendered file:

---
title: <meeting title>
date: YYYY-MM-DD
attendees: [<name>, ...]
duration: <N min>
otter_id: <gmail_message_id>
source: otter
---

# <meeting title>

## Summary

<AI summary, verbatim>

## Action items

- <item>
- <item>

*Otter listed N action items; M inlined in the email. The remaining items and
the full transcript are in the Otter web app.*

The summary and action items are kept verbatim — the helper never re-summarizes or translates. (Otter's transcription occasionally garbles proper nouns like model names or acronyms; leave the body as-is and note corrections in the project's curated docs/meetings.md if the user maintains one.)

Step 7 — update dedup state and report

After each successful save, append to .otter_processed.json and write back. On failure, do not record it.

Report:

• N summaries processed
• Per project: count + new files (relative paths)
• Unmatched: count + files in inbox (suggest a routing rule)
• Skipped (already processed): count
• Any meeting whose action_items_total > items shown (so the user knows to open Otter for the rest)

Meetings with both Otter and Tactiq

The same meeting can be captured by both tools (Otter for the summary, Tactiq for the full transcript). When you know a meeting has both:

• Prefer the Tactiq file — the full verbatim transcript is higher fidelity.
• Skip the Otter twin, or save it alongside and note the Tactiq file is the primary record. Don't silently produce two competing files for one meeting without flagging it. Detecting the overlap is by (date, title) — check docs/meetings/ for a source: tactiq file on the same date before saving an Otter one.

Bootstrapping a project's routing block

The ## Meetings block is shared with /tactiq. If a project has one already, /otter uses it as-is. If the user asks to "set up otter routing for ", add the block (only on request) with placeholder title_contains / attendee_name rules to edit.

Gotchas

• Address and dedup by Gmail message ID, never by subject — Otter reuses the identical subject Meeting Summary for <title> for every instance of a recurring meeting.
• get_thread on an Otter email usually exceeds the inline size limit and is saved to a file — use that path; don't fight to read it inline.
• Otter emails are mostly tracking-link boilerplate; the parser strips URLs and HTML entities. If a future email layout changes and summary/action_items come back empty, the banner/marker regexes in otter_helpers.py need updating.
• participants is best-effort (action-item owners only). Use --attendees to fix the frontmatter when it matters.
• The full transcript is never in the email. Do not imply the saved file is a transcript — it is a summary.
• If .otter_processed.json is missing or corrupt, treat as empty and warn before reprocessing a backlog.