Can an AI Notetaker Handle a Meeting That Switches Languages?

Usually yes, if the setting was right before the call

Most notetakers now document a way to handle a meeting in more than one language. Fireflies, Granola and Otter all describe one. The catch is that each means something different by it, and in all three the setting is normally chosen before anyone speaks. Pick the wrong one and nothing warns you during the call. The part of the conversation in the other language turns up in the transcript as confident nonsense, or does not turn up at all.

That matters more than it sounds, because in a lot of bilingual teams the second language is where the real discussion happens. The customer hears English. The pricing argument and the quiet admission that March is not realistic happen in Hindi or Spanish. A tool that kept only the English kept the polite half of the meeting.

Auto detect often means one language

The most common mistake is choosing the option with the friendliest name. Fireflies offers two that sound alike. Its language page says Auto-Detect transcribes the dominant language of the meeting, while a separate Multi-Language (Auto-Detect) mode, still marked beta, transcribes several languages in the same meeting. Its multi-language article tells users outright not to pick Auto-Detect for multilingual meetings. That mode is also limited to the Business and Enterprise plans, so a team trialling a cheaper plan may never see the setting that answers its question.

Granola splits the same way on desktop. Its English setting is described as best quality when most of your meetings are in English, and its Multi-language setting transcribes all of its desktop languages even when several are spoken in one meeting. The mobile apps work differently. They pick a single language for the meeting, Granola advises sticking to one language throughout, and the language cannot be changed once the meeting is transcribed.

Otter is the narrowest of the three. Its help center says it transcribes in one language at a time. The one documented exception is French: set French as the default and Otter will switch to English when it hears it. It states plainly that no other pairing with English is supported.

A multilingual mode can still guess wrong

Switching on the multilingual mode does not settle it. When we built language handling into Driffle, we tested a speech model's multi language mode on a recording that mixed Hindi and English, the way a lot of meetings in India actually sound. The model identified it as Spanish. The same audio, transcribed with Hindi set explicitly, came back correctly, with the English stretches readable and the Hindi written in Devanagari script.

Two things follow for anyone evaluating a tool. When you already know which two languages your meetings use, naming them can beat letting the model guess. And check what script the output comes back in. Plenty of people type Hindi in Roman letters in chat, so a transcript in Devanagari can be accurate and still not be what your team expects to read or search for.

Fixing it afterwards is limited

Because the choice is usually made before the call, the practical question is what you can do when it was wrong. The answers differ more than the feature lists suggest.

• Otter cannot reprocess a conversation in a different language. Changing the language halfway through a meeting has no effect, because the recording stays in the language set when it started. The documented workaround is to export the audio, change the setting and import the file again.
• Fireflies can re-transcribe a processed meeting in another language up to three times, and only if you are the host or owner. Re-transcribing replaces the transcript, so manual edits are lost. Its multi-language article separately warns against changing the language once a multilingual meeting has been processed, because reprocessing can affect accuracy.
• Granola applies a changed setting to new meetings only and cannot translate old transcripts. On desktop you can switch language from the meeting controls during a call, with a brief pause while the new model loads, and doing so also changes your default for every future meeting.

The summary picks a language too

The transcript is not the last place a language gets chosen. Granola has a separate summary setting: English, or Auto, which writes the notes in the majority language transcribed during the meeting. On its mobile apps the summary always follows the majority language and there is no manual setting. Fireflies writes the multi-language summary in the dominant language spoken.

In a mixed meeting, that means a small shift in who talked longest can change the language of the notes. A sales lead who reads only English can open a summary in Spanish because the client's team did most of the talking. Decide which language your notes should be written in and check that the tool lets you keep them there.

One recording to make before you buy

The language count on a pricing page will not tell you any of this. Your own audio will. Record one real or staged call in the mix your team actually uses, with at least one commitment said only in the second language, such as a date and an owner, and then check:

• whether that sentence appears in the transcript in a form someone on your team can read
• whether the commitment lands in the action items under the right person
• which language the summary was written in, and whether you could change it
• whether searching for a word from that sentence finds the meeting
• what the tool lets you do if the language setting was wrong, and who is allowed to do it

Run it on the plan and device you would use

Fireflies' multi-language mode is not on every plan, and Granola's mobile apps behave differently from its desktop app. A test on a different plan or device answers a different question, so make the recording in the setup your team would actually live with.

How Driffle handles it

Driffle asks a different question from a single language dropdown. In Settings, under Transcription, you tick each language you speak from a list of ten: English, Hindi, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Japanese. Tick one and Driffle transcribes in exactly that language. If your set includes Hindi, it transcribes in Hindi, which handles Hindi and English together. Any other combination uses auto detect. The settings screen tells you which of those it will do before your next meeting, and you can change the language for a single meeting from the language menu in the transcript panel.

The Hindi rule exists because of the Spanish result above, the one case where letting the model guess got it wrong in our testing. The limits are real. Ten languages is a much shorter list than Fireflies or Granola document, so if your meetings run in Mandarin or Tamil, Driffle is not the right tool today. Transcription happens in the cloud, so this is not an offline or on-device feature. Driffle captures from your Mac without a bot joining the call, and it is a direct download for Apple Silicon Macs only. Intel Mac, Windows and Linux are available only through a request form.

What to take into the trial

An AI notetaker can handle a meeting that switches languages, provided the right mode was chosen before the call and is included in the plan you are paying for. Check the summary language as well as the transcript, and trust your own mixed call over the number on the pricing page.

If your meetings mix English with Hindi or another of the ten languages above and you want notes without a bot in the call, Driffle is a Mac download at driffle.ai/download.