Otter AI has significantly broadened its transcription capabilities, adding 27 new languages to bring its total to 31—a move the company describes as its largest linguistic expansion to date. Thirteen of these languages are available immediately, while fourteen more are slated to arrive soon. Beyond the language count, Otter is also preparing a feature that detects language switches within a single meeting and continues transcribing without requiring any manual adjustment. The details were first reported by TechCrunch.
The promise is straightforward: a call that jumps from English to Korean and then to Portuguese should not stop transcribing along the way.
- 31 languages total: Otter AI has added 27 new languages, with 13 live now and 14 coming soon.
- Multilingual meeting transcription: A forthcoming feature will automatically detect mid-conversation language changes and keep transcribing without manual intervention.
- Beyond transcription: Otter has also introduced Work Mode and Live Assist, and recently raised $320 million from General Catalyst.
Which languages are available now and which are coming?
Thirteen languages are available immediately, with a strong presence of Asian and European tongues. According to TechCrunch, users can already transcribe Mandarin Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish. Still to come are Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian.
The new languages run on Otter’s own speech models, trained on publicly accessible datasets and reviewed by volunteer native speakers. It is the same race toward more accurate transcription in more languages that tools like HappyScribe—which already handles technical jargon—and systems that transcribe multiple speakers simultaneously in real time are competing in.
What else is changing at Otter?
The most interesting piece is multilingual transcription within a single meeting, which is still to come. According to TechCrunch, this feature will detect language changes mid-conversation and continue transcribing without manual intervention, designed for global teams where language differences complicate meetings. It marks a leap from choosing a fixed language at the start.
Otter, which recently raised $320 million (around €285.4 million) from General Catalyst, has also added other features: Work Mode, which uses meeting history and connected apps to help prepare for upcoming calls, and Live Assist, which offers real-time suggestions during a meeting. For those who move between several languages, it is worth keeping a guide to speech-to-text and text-to-speech tools on hand to choose the best fit.
My reading is that Otter is shifting from being a transcriber to becoming a meeting assistant, and this expansion is consistent with that ambition. Going from a handful of languages to 31 is no small detail: it opens the tool to teams that were previously left out, and transcription that switches languages on its own tackles a real problem for distributed companies. That said, it is worth not confusing “available” with “reliable”: transcribing a language well—with its accents, jargon, and background noise—is far harder than listing it in an announcement, and fourteen of these languages are not even active yet. The move is ambitious and headed in the right direction; the proof, as always with transcription, will come from the discerning ear of those who use it in their own language.