The last week of 2025 was quiet, as holiday weeks are — but a few launches still point at where the app layer is heading.
Otter caps 2025 at $100M ARR
On December 22, Otter.ai's year-end recap noted it crossed $100M ARR in 2025 and rolled out a suite of AI Meeting Agents alongside enterprise and global expansion — the notetaker category moving from passive transcription toward agents that act on your meetings.
xAI adds retrieval to the Grok API
On December 24, xAI shipped Grok Collections, built-in retrieval-augmented generation in its API — upload and search PDFs, spreadsheets, and codebases at a flat $2.50 per 1,000 searches. It makes building a research agent on Grok simpler (no separate vector database to wire up).
ChatGPT ships a year in review
Also December 22, OpenAI rolled out "Your Year with ChatGPT," a Spotify-Wrapped-style recap surfacing each user's most-discussed topics, an inferred "chat style," and 2026 predictions — a small but telling sign of how personal these assistants have become.
What it means if you're picking tools
Transcription, research, and assistant tools all keep absorbing agentic capability. See transcription, research, and chat assistants.
Sources: Otter.ai year-end recap · xAI Grok Collections API · Your Year with ChatGPT (TechCrunch)