Otter.ai on November 10, 2026 announced what it called the largest multilingual expansion in its history, unveiling the change at Web Summit Lisbon. The Mountain View company said it is adding 27 languages to its AI notetaker and conversation knowledge platform: 13 available immediately and 14 marked as coming soon. Once that later group ships, Otter said, the service will support 31 languages in total. The company also previewed a forthcoming multilingual transcription option that would follow a meeting as people switch among supported languages, without anyone changing a setting by hand.
The 13 languages available now are Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), German, Italian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese and Polish. They join the four languages Otter already supported: English, French, Spanish and Japanese. The 14 languages listed as coming soon are Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian and Romanian. Users pick a supported language in their Otter settings. The new languages carry no extra charge across Otter plans and are available on desktop, mobile and in the browser.
The promised multilingual mode is separate from those immediately available language additions. Otter said it is coming soon and would detect language changes as a conversation unfolds, so a sales call could move from English to Portuguese to Mandarin, or, as TechCrunch later illustrated, from English to Korean to Portuguese, without pausing to change a setting. That is different from today's workflow, in which a user selects the language spoken in the original audio before recording or importing a file. Automatic transcription is also distinct from translation: choosing a transcription language produces text in the language that was spoken.
Otter said the new languages run on speech models that it trains, tunes and operates on its own infrastructure rather than wrapping a third-party AI service. The company repeated a long-standing claim that it does not send customer audio to third parties for processing and said that practice now extends to each new language. In comments to TechCrunch, whose Lauren Forristal reported the news on November 9, 2026 at 11:00 p.m. Pacific time, Otter said it trained the new models on publicly available datasets and worked with native-speaking volunteers who reviewed transcripts for accuracy. The first-party announcement also said Otter averaged 96 percent accuracy on the Open ASR Leaderboard in English benchmark testing, a vendor figure that has not been independently audited in this reporting for the newly added languages.
The company said the new languages apply across its meeting workflow, not only the transcript. Before a call, Work Mode can pull past conversations and connected apps into a brief. During a meeting, summaries, action items, speaker identification, AI Chat and search are described as working across supported languages. Afterward, Work Mode can turn the conversation into follow-up emails and customer-relationship-management updates in the language of the meeting. Sam Liang, Otter's co-founder and chief executive, said many large international companies already use the product across time zones and languages, and that building speech recognition in-house is what lets the company add the 27 languages with the accuracy and private audio it wants to offer.
Otter described itself as serving more than 40 million users, including more than 86 percent of the Fortune 500, and as having transcribed more than one billion meetings, figures that come from the company. It pointed to a 2024 Capterra collaboration survey in which 42 percent of international knowledge workers named language barriers as one of their top challenges. An Otter spokesperson told TechCrunch the expansion is meant to help companies build a system of record for voice decisions across languages. The announcement sits alongside recent product additions already covered separately, including Work Mode and Live Assist, and follows a $320 million growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund. The first-party post is bylined Otter and lists Mitchell Woodrow as the media contact. Readers should note that 14 of the 27 languages and the code-switching multilingual mode have not shipped yet, and that accuracy and adoption claims for the new languages rest on Otter's own account.