Otter Adds 27 Languages and Live Language Switching to Its AI Meeting Notes

Once the rollout is finished, Otter will support 31 languages, the company told TechCrunch. The feature for mixed-language meetings is still to come. It will detect when a conversation changes language and keep transcribing without the user changing any settings. Otter gave the example of a call that moves from English to Korean to Portuguese.

The update matters for international companies whose meetings often mix languages, a group Otter has struggled to serve with a mostly English product. It also brings Arabic onto the list, which is relevant to Gulf companies that run meetings in both Arabic and English.

Thirteen of the new languages are available now: Mandarin Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese and Polish. The other 14 are listed as coming soon: Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian and Romanian. Otter did not give a date for them.

The new languages run on Otter's own speech models. The company said it trained them on publicly available datasets and used native-speaking volunteers to review transcripts and check accuracy. It did not publish accuracy figures.

"Otter is breaking down language barriers so any company, no matter where they're based, can build a system of record for the decisions for voice AI communication," an Otter spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The expansion is part of Otter's push beyond transcription into other workplace AI tools, after its $320 million funding from General Catalyst. It recently launched Work Mode, which draws on meeting history and connected apps to help users prepare for calls. Work Mode can pull in earlier customer conversations, open action items, teammates' notes from similar calls and recent Google Drive files. Otter has also added Live Assist, which suggests points in real time during a meeting based on what has been said so far.

The 14 remaining languages, including Arabic and Hindi, have no release date yet. Neither does the automatic language-switching feature.