The key facts

  • Otter.ai is adding 27 languages; 31 languages will be supported in total
  • 13 languages are already available, including Russian; the remaining 14 will arrive later
  • A new feature detects language changes during a single meeting without changing settings

Otter.ai's largest language expansion

Otter.ai, a meeting notes and transcription service, announced on Tuesday an expansion of its multilingual capabilities. The company is adding support for 27 languages — the largest language expansion in its history; once the rollout is complete, the platform will support 31 languages. TechCrunch reports on this.

What is already available and what is coming later

Thirteen languages are already live: Mandarin Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish. Fourteen more — including Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian — will arrive later. The new languages run on Otter's own speech models trained on publicly available datasets; transcription accuracy was checked by native speakers who volunteered.

Language switching within a single meeting

The key new feature is multilingual transcription, which automatically detects language changes during a conversation and continues transcribing without any settings changes: a call may switch from English to Korean and Portuguese, and Otter will keep following the conversation throughout. The company positions the update as a solution to a common problem for international teams, where language differences complicate meetings and collaboration.

Context: expansion beyond transcription

The announcement comes amid Otter's broader development beyond simple transcription. In October, the company raised $320 million from General Catalyst's growth fund, and recently introduced Work Mode — a feature that, based on meeting history and connected apps, helps prepare for calls by pulling in data from past customer conversations, open tasks, colleagues' notes from similar calls, and recent Google Drive files. Another recent addition is Live Assist, which provides real-time coaching: it analyzes the conversation and offers prompts based on what has already been said and what is happening in the moment.