Otter.ai Supported Languages in 2026 — and the Limit Nobody Mentions

Short answer: yes, Otter.ai supports more than English. As of August 2026 it transcribes six languages. If you came here to check whether German, Spanish, French or Japanese are on the list — they are.

The thing that actually trips people up is different, and Otter's own documentation says it plainly: it transcribes one language at a time.

The full list

Checked 12 August 2026 against Otter's help centre. Otter has said more languages are coming, so verify at help.otter.ai before relying on this — a list like this goes stale.

So Russian, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Arabic, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Ukrainian and the rest are not supported. If that's your language, Otter isn't an option and no setting will change it.

How to change the language in Otter

It's an account setting, not a per-file choice:

1. Click your profile, top left
2. Account Settings
3. Conversation Language
4. Pick the default

The important part: you set it before the recording, not after. If you record a German meeting while the setting says English, you get English-shaped nonsense, and re-running it isn't possible — you'd need the audio and a second attempt.

The limit nobody mentions

From Otter's own help centre: Otter can only transcribe in one language at a time, with multi-language transcription described as a future update.

There is one partial exception — set your default to French and Otter will switch to English when it hears it. That's a specific pair, not a general capability.

This matters more than the language list, because real conversations don't stay in one language:

• A client call that starts in English and drifts into the client's native language
• An interview where the subject quotes something in another language
• A standup where half the team speaks Spanish and half English
• Any bilingual household, team or classroom

In all of these, every language on Otter's supported list is present — and Otter still can't produce a clean transcript, because the constraint isn't which languages, it's how many at once.

What to use instead

Two different problems, so be honest about which one you have.

Your language isn't on the list. You need a tool with broad language coverage. That's most general-purpose transcription tools, including Voiz.

Your language is on the list, but your recordings mix languages. This is the narrower problem, and it's the one Voiz was built around. Voiz auto-detects what's being spoken — no setting to configure before recording — and keeps up when a speaker switches mid-sentence. You get the transcript in the original language or languages, speaker labels, and a separate translation pass if you can't read the original.

Comparison

Otter wins on two rows and they're real ones: it joins your meetings live, and its free tier is five times larger. If you run English meetings and want a bot in the call, Otter is the better tool and this article isn't trying to talk you out of it.

Voiz is worth a look when the language is the constraint — yours isn't among the six, or your recordings don't stay in one. Upload something short and compare the output yourself.

More on how Voiz handles this: multilingual transcription, transcribing meetings and voice messages.