Otter.ai adds 27 languages and previews mixed-language transcripts

In short: Otter.ai expanded its transcription language support and announced a new feature that can keep up when people switch languages during the same meeting.

What happened

Otter.ai, a tool that turns meetings into written notes, said it is adding support for 27 more languages. Once the rollout is finished, Otter will support 31 languages in total.

Otter also shared an upcoming feature for multilingual transcription. This means Otter can write down what people say even if the speakers switch languages mid conversation, without anyone changing settings. For example, a call could move from English to Korean to Portuguese, and Otter would continue capturing the text.

Thirteen of the new languages are available now: Mandarin Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish. Fourteen more are coming soon, including Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian.

Otter told TechCrunch it built these additions using its own speech models, meaning its in house system for recognizing speech (like a very fast typist that listens). The company said it trained them on public datasets and used native speaking volunteers to review transcripts for accuracy.

Why it matters

More workplaces have teams spread across countries, and meetings often include more than one language. A tool that can keep transcribing through language switches can make it easier to review decisions later, like having one set of minutes even when the discussion changes languages.

Source: TechCrunch AI