Scaling AI-Powered Meeting Intelligence: How Notta Achieved 10X Faster Search with Zilliz Cloud
10X Performance Improvement
Latency reduced from 1 second to 100 milliseconds
Seamless Migration
Successfully transferred 30 million+ hours of voice data with minimal disruption
Reduced Technical Overhead
Enabled focus on core business value creation
The competitive advantage for meeting transcription products in the future will come from personalization – providing tailored insights and recommendations based on each user's specific meeting data and usage patterns. This is why performant vector search is imperative.
TJ Dai
The Market Opportunity
Meetings drive organizational success by facilitating information exchange, collaboration, and decision-making. Yet most professionals find them frustrating – they waste time, lack documentation, and rarely lead to concrete action. This pain point represents a massive market opportunity that Notta seized.
Notta's Market Breakthrough in Japan
In 2020, Notta gained instant visibility when featured on Asahi News, causing a traffic surge that initially resembled a server attack. By 2022, the company secured $10 million in funding led by Hillhouse Ventures, and by late 2024, their platform supported transcription in 58 languages, real-time translation for multilingual meetings, one-click summaries, and collaborative features.
Notta captured 75% of Japanese consumer users and expanded into enterprise settings through a bottom-up approach. A prime example is Yachiyo Engineering, where a single employee's purchase spread throughout the company, eventually leading to an enterprise deployment for over 500 of their 1,000 employees.
Their success metrics are impressive: 10+ million global users, 4,000+ enterprise customers, 30+ million hours of transcription (75% from Japan), and $10+ million ARR in 2024.
Strategic Differentiation
Notta thrives in a crowded field against competitors like Otter.AI and Fireflies.AI by executing a three-part strategy.
First, they built for their home market with genuine cultural insight. As a Japanese-headquartered company, Notta understood that Japanese business culture demands specific features and approaches. Implementing yen-based pricing wasn't just a localization tactic — it was about respecting their market and resulted in an immediate 30-40% revenue boost. Their deeper advantage came from intimate knowledge of how Japanese professionals conduct and document meetings, where formality, structured summaries, and proper documentation hierarchy aren't just preferences but essential business practices. This contrasts with American users, who often treat similar tools as general AI assistants. Notta's Japanese-first design philosophy — incorporating the business etiquette and documentation standards native to Japanese corporate culture — gave them an authenticity that international competitors couldn't match when attempting to enter the Japanese market.
Second, they created an ecosystem. Notta plugged into Google Calendar, Microsoft Outlook, Zoom, and Teams, creating seamless workflows from scheduling through task assignment. This tight integration made Notta sticky — once in a workflow, users rarely switch.
Third, they built superior technology. Notta delivers 98.86% transcription accuracy, works across all devices, supports diverse file formats, and meets enterprise security standards (HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, APPI). Their Notta Bot can even attend meetings on users' behalf — a standout feature that competitors haven't matched.
Technical Evolution and New Capabilities
As Notta's platform evolved, they implemented an AI chatbot using RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) architecture. This system converts meeting transcripts into vector embeddings that capture semantic meaning beyond simple keywords. These vectors are stored in a database that enables high-dimensional nearest neighbor searches, returning contextually relevant results even when exact terms aren't matched.
Initially, Notta used a vector search index bolted onto a public cloud provider, which performed well for early-stage needs like keyword searches and semantic queries. However, as Notta scaled to 30 million hours of transcription, they encountered serious performance bottlenecks, with search latency reaching over 1000ms—unacceptable for an interactive product.
To solve this, Notta migrated to Zilliz Cloud, leveraging its Cardinal Search Engine, which automatically adapts to different workloads and delivers 10X faster results out of the box. Key benefits included:
Latency reduction from 1000ms to ~100ms (10x improvement), well below the 200ms industry standard for real-time applications
Self-optimizing search strategies, reducing the need for manual tuning while dynamically adjusting recall, precision, and storage trade-offs
Multi-threaded execution across x86 and ARM architectures, ensuring consistent high performance across diverse workloads and deployments
Graph-IVF hybrid indexing, balancing speed and accuracy for complex queries on long-form meeting data
With Cardinal’s self-tuning capabilities, Notta eliminated the need for manual search tuning, enabling their engineers to focus on higher-value AI-driven features rather than fine-tuning infrastructure. This transition not only improved scalability but also lowered compute overhead by up to 80%, maximizing price-performance efficiency.
Current Application and Future Direction
Looking ahead, Notta is turning meetings into a true enterprise knowledge hub. According to TJ Dai, CTO of Notta, "The evolution of meeting productivity follows three waves of information density improvement: speech-to-text conversion, AI-powered summarization, and now, contextual retrieval with insights. With Zilliz Cloud powering our vector search capabilities, we've been able to make this a reality for our customers, delivering contextual intelligence at the speed users expect."
Notta is already leading this third wave by expanding its AI-driven retrieval and automation capabilities. The next frontier isn’t just capturing discussions—it’s transforming them into actionable intelligence that drives business decisions. By identifying patterns across conversations and seamlessly integrating with enterprise workflows, Notta is ensuring that every meeting delivers lasting value.