Otter AI can now follow conversations across 30+ languages

Otter.ai on Tuesday announced what it calls its largest language expansion to date: support for 27 additional languages, plus an upcoming multilingual transcription feature that can track a meeting even as speakers switch languages partway through. Once the rollout finishes, the note-taking platform will cover 31 languages overall, widening its reach for international teams.

The multilingual capability is designed to detect language changes automatically and keep transcribing without users touching any settings. Otter's example: a single call might move from English to Korean to Portuguese, with the transcription following along throughout rather than stalling or requiring a manual toggle. The company frames the update as a direct answer to a persistent problem for global teams, where mismatched languages make meetings and collaboration harder than they need to be.

"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. Thirteen of the 27 new languages are live now: Mandarin Chinese, Korean, German, Italian, Cantonese, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish. The other 14 are labeled coming soon — Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian.

The added languages run on Otter's own speech models rather than a third-party engine. The company said it trained them on publicly available datasets and brought in native-speaking volunteers to review transcripts and check accuracy — an approach that keeps language coverage in-house but puts ongoing quality judgment partly on human reviewers.

The language push lands as Otter broadens beyond transcription into wider workplace AI tooling, following a $320 million funding round led by General Catalyst. Two recent additions show the direction: Work Mode uses meeting history and connected apps — prior customer conversations, outstanding action items, teammates' notes on similar calls, recent Google Drive files — to help users prep for upcoming calls, while Live Assist offers real-time coaching during a meeting by analyzing what has already been said and what is happening in the moment.

What to watch: whether the 14 pending languages arrive on the stated timeline and how accurately the models hold up in mixed-language meetings, where volunteers' spot-checking may be harder to scale. Equally open is whether multilingual support and prep features push Otter from a transcription utility toward the "system of record" it describes — and whether the General Catalyst-funded build-out keeps pace with rivals folding similar capabilities into their own meeting tools.