For example, participants could move between English, Korean, and Portuguese during the same meeting without interrupting the discussion to adjust transcription settings.
The initial rollout adds Mandarin Chinese, German, Italian, Cantonese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish. These join Otter's existing support for English, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
A second group of languages is expected to follow, including Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian. Otter has not specified when the remaining languages or automatic multilingual transcription will become available.
The expansion addresses a persistent challenge for companies operating across different countries. According to Capterra's 2024 Collaboration and Productivity Survey, 42% of international knowledge workers identified language barriers as a major obstacle to collaboration.
Otter says its approach differs from AI transcription services that depend on outside speech recognition providers. The company develops, trains, and operates its own speech models, allowing it to customize recognition systems for individual languages while keeping audio processing within its infrastructure.
According to TechCrunch, Otter used publicly available datasets to train the new language models and enlisted native speakers to evaluate transcripts and help assess accuracy.
The company reported an average accuracy rate of 96% in English testing on the Open ASR Leaderboard. That figure applies to English recognition and does not establish equivalent accuracy across the newly supported languages.
Otter also emphasized its approach to audio privacy, saying it has processed recordings without sending them to third-party services for more than a decade. The company says that practice will continue as additional languages become available.
“Many large international companies are already using Otter to improve collaboration and productivity for teams in different time zones and speaking multiple languages,” said Sam Liang, Otter.ai's co-founder and CEO. “We built our speech recognition in-house from the beginning, so we can build every language the right way, with leading accuracy and private audio. That’s what lets us bring 27 new languages to Otter.”
The language expansion also extends beyond basic transcription. Otter says supported languages will work across its broader meeting workflow, including AI-generated summaries, action items, speaker identification, search, and its conversational AI Chat feature.
The update builds on Otter's recent efforts to develop workplace AI tools that handle tasks before, during, and after meetings.
Its recently introduced Work Mode feature gathers information from earlier conversations and connected applications to prepare users for upcoming calls. It can incorporate previous customer discussions, outstanding tasks, relevant notes from colleagues, and documents stored in Google Drive.
Following a meeting, Work Mode can generate follow-up emails and CRM updates using information from the conversation. Otter says these capabilities will operate in supported languages, allowing teams to carry meeting information into subsequent workflows without switching to English.
The company has also introduced Live Assist, a separate feature that analyzes meetings as they happen and offers contextual suggestions based on the discussion.
These additions follow Otter's $320 million funding round from General Catalyst, as the company broadens its product beyond automated note-taking into meeting preparation, real-time assistance, and follow-up work.
The multilingual rollout extends those capabilities to more international users while addressing the practical difficulties of meetings involving speakers from different language backgrounds.
The 13 newly supported languages are available at no additional charge across Otter's subscription plans. Users can choose their preferred language in the application's settings, with access supported on desktop, mobile devices, and browsers.
Automatic transcription across multiple languages within a single conversation remains an upcoming feature. Once introduced, it will allow Otter to capture multilingual discussions without requiring participants to manually change language settings during meetings.
This analysis is based on reporting from Business Wire & TechCrunch.
Image courtesy of Otter.ai.
This article was generated with AI assistance and reviewed for accuracy and quality.
