Otter added 27 languages. The feature in the headline isn't live yet
Otter.ai is rolling out 27 new transcription languages, 13 of them today. The part that follows a conversation as it switches languages mid-meeting is still labeled coming soon.
Otter.ai said Tuesday it’s adding 27 languages to its AI notetaker, the biggest language expansion the company has done. Thirteen are live right now, 14 more are “coming soon” with no ship date, and once all of them land, Otter will support 31 languages total.
That’s a real update. It’s also not quite what some headlines made it sound like.
What’s live today
TechCrunch’s write-up ran under “Otter AI can now follow conversations across 30+ languages.” Read the body of that same article, and Otter’s own press release, and the picture is more specific. The feature that actually follows a conversation as speakers switch languages mid-meeting, say from English to Portuguese to Mandarin without anyone touching a setting, is listed as upcoming. It isn’t on today.
What’s live today is simpler: pick one of the 13 new languages in your Otter settings, and the app transcribes, summarizes and pulls action items in that language, the same workflow it already does for English, French, Spanish and Japanese. Mixed-language meetings still need someone to set the language in advance, not switch it automatically mid-call.
| Status | Languages |
|---|---|
| Live now (13) | Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, Polish |
| Coming soon (14) | Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian |
What’s still coming
Otter says the gap is deliberate. According to the company, its speech models are built and trained in-house rather than wrapped around a third-party ASR engine, and CEO Sam Liang said that’s what lets Otter add languages “the right way, with leading accuracy and private audio.” Otter also says it worked with native-speaking volunteers to check transcript accuracy for the new languages, though it hasn’t published word-error-rate numbers for any of them the way it has for English, where it reports 96% accuracy on the Open ASR Leaderboard.
There’s no price change here. The new languages are available across every Otter plan, on desktop, mobile and browser, and the company isn’t charging extra for them.
Otter has been shipping features fast this cycle. It raised $320 million from General Catalyst’s growth fund last month, and it followed that with Work Mode, a feature that preps users for calls using past meeting history, and Live Assist, which coaches users in real time during a meeting. The language expansion slots into that same push to be more than a transcription tool, the same direction Perplexity’s always-on Teammates are aimed at for a different part of office work.
My read
This is still worth noting, because 13 production-ready languages at no extra cost is bigger than most notetaker updates get. Fortune 500 companies already use Otter at scale, so adding Mandarin, German and Portuguese in one release reaches a lot of real meetings. But “can now follow conversations across 30+ languages” oversells it by a release cycle. The more accurate framing is that 13 new languages shipped, and a cross-language tracking feature is in the pipeline.
If you run global meetings, the practical move right now is to check whether your team’s languages are on the “available today” list of 13, not the “coming soon” list of 14. If cross-language switching is the feature you actually want, that one isn’t out yet.
Related: Perplexity’s always-on AI teammates cost $200 a month and raise a similar question about what a workplace AI tool is actually ready to do versus what gets announced.
Note on sources: I read Otter.ai’s own press release in full and TechCrunch’s coverage in full. Both confirm the same 13-live, 14-coming-soon split and both describe the cross-language feature as upcoming, not shipped, even though TechCrunch’s headline implies otherwise. The General Catalyst funding figure comes from TechCrunch’s earlier report, linked below.