Multilingual Expansion for Otter.ai

AI notetaker and conversational knowledge platform Otter.ai is adding 27 new languages to its package, which recognizes and transcribes conversations as speakers move between languages in a meeting, and helps users make use of the data throughout their business.

Otter claims more than 40 million users for its AI notetaker, including more than 86% of the Fortune 500. Its solutions use proprietary ASR and speaker identification technology to turn meetings into searchable intelligence and automated action items, syncing with existing business software and learning as they go. Last month it closed $320 million in growth financing, with which to fuel its development as a 'conversation knowledge engine', helping to capture, connect and activate 'every' business conversation. Funds will also be used for international expansion.

Adding to four existing languages (English, French, Spanish and Japanese), thirteen are available today: Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), German, Italian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese and Polish. Fourteen more are to be added shortly, including Persian, Thai, Hindi, Arabic and four Nordic languages.

Otter says research by Capterra shows that global teams rarely work in just one language, with 42% of international knowledge workers naming language barriers as one of their top challenges when collaborating. The firm notes that its speech models are trained, tuned, and run in-house on its own infrastructure, not 'wrapped around a third-party AI service', providing more reliable translations. The new languages work across the whole workflow, not just the transcript but providing plans before the meeting, summaries afterwards and other services such as CRM updates. Another forthcoming upgrade will allow the software to follow conversations live across languages with no manual setting changes required.

Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO comments: 'We built our speech recognition in-house from the beginning, so we can build every language the right way, with leading accuracy and private audio.'

The firm is headquartered in Mountain View, California and is online at www.otter.ai . Pictured L to R are CEO Sam Liang and CTO Yun Fu.