Otter AI Now Transcribes Meetings in 31 Languages, Switching Mid-Sentence

Otter.ai will support 31 languages after its largest language expansion to date — 27 new ones — plus a multilingual transcription feature that follows a conversation as speakers switch languages mid-meeting, the company announced Tuesday.

That second capability is the real headline for anyone running distributed teams. Otter will automatically detect language changes and keep transcribing without the user touching any settings. A single call can move from English to Korean to Portuguese, and the transcript keeps up throughout, according to the company.

What does this change for global teams?

Plenty of multinationals already run meetings where participants drift between English and a local language. Until now, that broke transcription tools — you either picked one language and lost half the meeting, or you didn't transcribe at all. Otter's update removes that trade-off for its user base.

The company frames it as infrastructure, not a convenience feature. "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.

Which languages are live now?

Thirteen of the 27 new languages are available immediately:

• Mandarin Chinese
• Korean
• German
• Italian
• Cantonese
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Indonesian
• Malay
• Dutch
• Turkish
• Vietnamese
• Polish

The remaining 14 are flagged as coming soon: Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian. Once the rollout completes, Otter will support 31 languages in total.

There's a technical detail worth noting for buyers evaluating accuracy. The new languages run on Otter's own speech models — not a third-party engine. The company said it trained them on publicly available datasets and then had native-speaking volunteers review transcripts and check accuracy. That review step matters: multilingual transcription quality varies widely, and vendor-trained models with native-speaker validation tend to outperform generic APIs on real meeting audio.

The bigger picture beyond transcription

The language push didn't come out of nowhere. It follows Otter's $320 million funding round from General Catalyst, and it fits a clear pattern: the company is moving from a note-taking tool toward a broader workplace AI platform.

Two recent products show the direction. Work Mode uses meeting history and connected apps to prep users before calls — it pulls information from previous customer conversations, outstanding action items, notes from teammates' similar calls, and recent Google Drive files. Think of it as a briefing packet assembled automatically before you dial in.

The other addition, Live Assist, works during the meeting rather than before it. It analyzes the conversation in real time and offers relevant suggestions based on what's already been discussed and what's happening in the moment — effectively real-time coaching for the person talking.

Why the timing matters

Put the pieces together and Otter is betting that the meeting layer — not the document layer — becomes the system of record for how companies actually make decisions. Multilingual support widens the addressable market beyond English-first organizations, which until now had to rely on local alternatives or skip transcription entirely.

For teams already paying for Otter, the practical calculus is straightforward: if your meetings mix two or more of the 31 supported languages, the new transcription feature eliminates the manual workarounds. If your workforce speaks Swedish, Hindi, or Arabic, the wait for the remaining 14 languages is the main open question — Otter hasn't published specific dates for that second wave.