Otter adds 27 transcription languages – Finnish coming soon, company says
Written by AI
The meeting notes service Otter has launched 13 new transcription languages, and 14 more, including Finnish, are coming soon, the company said. Otter also promises that transcription will continue when speakers switch language mid-meeting.
US-based Otter.ai announced the largest language expansion of its service so far in a press release on 10 November and presented it at Web Summit in Lisbon. Otter turns meeting speech into text and produces notes from it.
Otter previously supported English, French, Spanish and Japanese. It has now added Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese and Polish. Once the remaining 14 new languages are ready, the total will be 31. Languages due later include Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Arabic and Hindi. Otter did not give an exact date.
Otter also promises multilingual transcription. The service would recognise when a speaker switches language mid-meeting and keep transcribing without any change to the language setting. In the press release’s example, a sales call moves from English to Portuguese and Mandarin Chinese and back. The feature covers only supported languages and is not yet available: the press release says it is coming soon. TechCrunch’s headline and the French outlet Brief IA describe the feature as already live, although the text of TechCrunch’s article refers to an upcoming feature.
Otter said its own speech recognition models, which it trains and runs on its own servers, transcribe the new languages. The company says it does not send audio to third parties for processing. Otter told TechCrunch it trained the models on publicly available datasets and asked native-speaking volunteers to review transcripts.
Otter gives an accuracy figure only for English: its English transcription averaged 96 per cent accuracy on the Open ASR Leaderboard benchmark, the company said. It gave no figures for the new languages. Techeconomy, DigitalToday and SiliconReport rely on Otter’s press release and TechCrunch’s article and do not say they tested the service.
Otter said summaries, task lists, speaker identification, the AI Chat query feature and search work in all supported languages. The same applies to Work Mode, a feature for meeting preparation and follow-up.
Users can choose the language in Otter’s settings. The new languages cost nothing extra on any plan and work in the desktop, mobile and browser versions. Otter’s website says the free version includes 300 transcription minutes a month and up to 30 minutes per conversation.