Sam Liang is an engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Otter.ai and serves as its chief executive. The company builds software that transcribes meetings and turns spoken conversations into searchable, shareable notes, and it is among the most recognized names in AI note taking. Liang started the company in 2016 alongside Yun Fu under the corporate name AISense.
Before founding Otter.ai, Liang spent several years at Google, where he led the location platform that powers the blue dot showing a user position on Google Maps. He holds a doctorate from Stanford University and built an earlier mobile startup that was acquired before he turned to speech recognition. His public profile is documented on the company site at otter.ai and through the Otter.ai entry on Wikipedia.
Who Sam Liang is
Sam Liang is a technologist whose career has centered on applying machine learning to everyday problems, first in mobile location and later in speech. He is based in Mountain View, California, where Otter.ai is headquartered, and he leads the company as its chief executive. Colleagues and interviewers describe him as an engineer-founder who stays close to the technical work behind the product.
His academic background is in electrical engineering and computer science. He completed a doctorate at Stanford University, and his graduate work and early career placed him in Silicon Valley at a time when location-aware mobile applications were becoming central to the smartphone era. That grounding in large-scale data systems carried directly into the speech recognition work he would later build a company around.
Building the blue dot at Google
Liang worked at Google during the years when mobile mapping was taking shape, and he is credited with leading the location platform behind the blue dot that marks a user position in Google Maps. The work involved combining signals from GPS, cellular networks, and Wi-Fi to estimate where a phone was with useful accuracy, a problem that sits at the intersection of sensor data and probabilistic modeling.
That experience shaped how he thinks about consumer products built on noisy real-world data. After Google, he founded a context-aware mobile startup called Alohar Mobile, which worked on understanding user location and behavior and was later acquired. The combination of large-scale data and consumer-facing inference became a through line connecting his mapping work to the transcription company he founded next.
Founding Otter.ai and his role
Liang co-founded the company that became Otter.ai in 2016, originally under the name AISense, with the goal of using deep learning to transcribe real conversations accurately and at scale. The consumer product, Otter, records meetings and lectures and produces live captions and editable transcripts, and it gained a following among professionals, students, and journalists who wanted a written record without taking notes by hand.
As chief executive, Liang has guided the company from a single transcription app toward a broader meeting assistant. Under his leadership the company released OtterPilot in 2023, an assistant that joins calendar meetings, summarizes them, and captures shared slides, and it has since added features that answer questions about past conversations. He represents the company publicly and speaks about where voice and AI assistants are heading.
Focus and outlook
Liang frames Otter.ai around the idea that conversations contain valuable information that is usually lost once a meeting ends. His stated focus has been on capturing that information automatically and making it useful afterward, whether as a summary, an action item, or an answer to a later question. That ambition has pushed the product steadily from transcription toward an assistant that can reason over what was said.
His work also places him in the middle of ongoing questions about consent and privacy in automated meeting recording, an issue the company has faced directly as note-taking assistants have become common. For founders interested in voice and AI products, Liang offers a case study in moving from a focused technical feature toward a broader platform. His company is profiled alongside other tools in our guide to the best AI tools for business.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Sam Liang?
Sam Liang is the co-founder and chief executive of Otter.ai, the AI company behind the Otter transcription app and the OtterPilot meeting assistant. He started the company in 2016 with Yun Fu.
What did Sam Liang do before Otter.ai?
He led the location platform behind the blue dot in Google Maps during his time at Google, and he later founded a context-aware mobile startup called Alohar Mobile that was acquired before he started Otter.ai.
What is Sam Liang educational background?
He holds a doctorate from Stanford University, with graduate training in electrical engineering and computer science.
What is Sam Liang role at Otter.ai?
He is co-founder and chief executive. He sets the company strategy, leads its product direction, and represents the company publicly. More about the company is available at otter.ai.
Where is Sam Liang based?
He is based in Mountain View, California, where Otter.ai is headquartered.
Sources: Otter.ai company site at otter.ai, and the Otter.ai entry on Wikipedia. For an overview of comparable tools, see our guide to the best AI tools for business.