Transcribing Finnish meetings: the 7 apps compared

The short answer

1. Noter AI. Finnish sits inside 60+ transcription languages with automatic language identification running on every recording. Nothing is chosen before you press record, so a meeting that slides from Finnish into English comes back as one transcript. It records a room from a phone, and the summary can be read in English when that is who the notes are for.

2. Fireflies.ai. Finnish inside 100+ languages with auto-detection, the broadest published list on this page. AI summaries are rationed by monthly credits on the lower plans, and pricing is per seat.

3. Notta. 58 transcription languages and a bilingual side-by-side view, held back by having no automatic detection. You commit to Finnish before the meeting starts. Check the current list covers it before paying.

4. Fathom. 38 languages and the most generous free plan in the category. Online calls only, so a Finnish meeting held in a room is out of reach.

5. tl;dv. Claims 30+ languages, good sales-call analytics, an iOS app sitting around 2 stars.

6. Granola. Claims 30+ languages and captures computer audio with no bot in the call. Its phone apps record a room, but a video call still has to be captured on the computer.

7. Otter.ai. No Finnish at all. Its six languages are English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. For Finnish meetings it is not an option.

Why Finnish breaks transcripts in its own way

Finnish is not a harder language to hear than Spanish. It is a language where the small sounds at the end of a word carry the information, which is the opposite of what most speech models are tuned for.

• Fifteen cases, and the ending does the work. Finnish glues suffixes onto a stem instead of putting prepositions in front of it. Talo is a house, talossa is in the house, talosta is out of the house, taloon is into the house. One consonant decides which. Get it wrong in a sentence about a budget or a deadline and the transcript still reads as correct Finnish.
• Compounds run long. What English writes as three or four words, Finnish writes as one: liiketoimintasuunnitelma (business plan), asiakaspalvelupäällikkö (customer service manager), kehityskeskustelu (performance review). A tool that splits a compound at the wrong seam leaves two halves that mean nothing, and search inside the transcript stops finding the term.
• Written Finnish and spoken Finnish are two registers. Kirjakieli is what gets printed. Puhekieli is what people actually say in a meeting: "minä olen" turns into "mä oon", "me olemme" into "me ollaan", "en tiedä" into "en tiiä". A model trained mostly on written text quietly rewrites the meeting into a form nobody used. Fine for a report, wrong for a record of who agreed to what.
• Length is meaning, not emphasis. Tuli is fire, tuuli is wind, tulli is customs. Doubled vowels and doubled consonants are separate sounds in Finnish, and a model that shortens them writes a real word in the wrong place. The dots matter the same way: päätös is a decision, paatos is pathos. If the ä and ö do not survive the export, you have lost more than accents.
• English arrives inside the grammar, not beside it. In Helsinki product meetings English stems take Finnish endings, so you hear "deployataan se perjantaina" and "mä buukkaan sen palaverin". A tool that fixes one language for the whole recording has to pick a side, and one of the two spellings comes out mangled.
• Finland-Swedish speakers are in the same room. Swedish is the country's other official language, so the switch can happen between two speakers rather than between two meetings. If that is your situation, test five minutes of a real mixed conversation before subscribing to anything on this page.

All 7 apps compared

The last column carries a caveat for Noter AI: its notes translate into 18 languages and Finnish is not one of them, so the direction that works is Finnish audio in, English or German notes out. Notta translates into 42 languages and is the one to check if a Finnish summary is the deciding factor.

Two columns settle most of this. "Supports Finnish" removes Otter before any other feature matters. "Auto-detects language" removes Notta for anyone whose meetings do not stay in one language, because the choice has to be made before the meeting shows what it is going to be.

#1 Noter AI

Noter AI is the app this site is about, so weigh the ranking accordingly. The reasons it fits Finnish work are specific ones.

Nothing to set before recording. Transcription runs on Soniox's speech model with automatic language identification enabled on every recording. There is no Finnish/English/Swedish selector to get wrong before a meeting that was not on your calendar an hour ago. Optional language hints exist if you want them.

Finnish and English mixing survives because the language is tagged word by word rather than fixed for the whole file. "Mä laitan sen backlogiin" comes back with the Finnish in Finnish and the English word spelled the way an English reader expects, instead of one of them arriving spelled out phonetically.

It records the room. Most Finnish meetings that matter are not scheduled video calls: a site visit, a supplier negotiation, a kehityskeskustelu, an interview, a municipal meeting. Noter records them from an iPhone, iPad or Android phone with one tap, a Control Center widget or Siri, and keeps recording with the screen locked. On Android there is a home-screen Quick Record widget and recording runs in a foreground service. Existing files import too (M4A, MP3, WAV and others). For virtual meetings a bot joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex, with Webex on iOS only.

What comes back. A transcript with speaker labels and timestamps, where tapping a sentence jumps the audio to that moment, plus an executive summary, a detailed analysis and action items with owners. You can ask questions across one note or across everything you have recorded. Export to PDF, Word or plain text. Processing runs at roughly two minutes per hour of audio.

One flat price. $9.99 per month or $69.99 per year covers transcription, summaries, translation of finished notes and action items. No per-seat fee, no monthly AI credits to ration. The iOS app is rated 4.8 stars on the App Store.

The honest limits. Finnish is a transcription language, not one of the 18 output languages. So a Finnish meeting can come back summarised in English, German, Spanish or any of the other 15, but an English meeting cannot come back summarised in Finnish, and the app interface is not available in Finnish either. There is no web or desktop app, no CRM integrations and no permanent free tier, though about five minutes of your own audio can be tested before paying. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, content is not used to train models, and you can delete your account and data at any time.

#2 Fireflies: the widest language list, metered summaries

Fireflies covers Finnish inside 100+ languages with automatic detection, so it does not force a choice before recording and it copes with English borrowings. Its mobile app on iOS and Android records in-person conversations, which older reviews still claim it cannot do. For a company living in Zoom or Teams, with around 50 integrations pushing notes into Slack, Notion, HubSpot or Salesforce, it is a reasonable pick.

Why it is not first here: in-person recording is the thinner half of a product built around a bot and a browser, AI summaries run on monthly credits on the lower plans, and billing is per seat at roughly $10 to $19 per seat per month. One person recording their own Finnish meetings ends up paying for a team product. See the Fireflies comparison.

#3 to #6: Notta, Fathom, tl;dv and Granola

Notta publishes 58 transcription languages and translation into 42, and its bilingual side-by-side transcript is genuinely useful if you produce Finnish and English versions of the same document. Then you hit the workflow. There is no automatic language detection, so the transcription language is set before recording starts, and a Finnish meeting captured as Swedish returns nonsense. Free sessions stop at three minutes, and on non-Enterprise plans your content is used for training. Confirm Finnish is on the live list before subscribing. See the Notta comparison.

Fathom has 38 languages and the best free plan in the category, and it only records online calls. It cannot import an audio file and cannot capture a conversation in a room, which rules out a large share of Finnish meetings. There is no Android app either, just an iOS waitlist. See the Fathom comparison.

tl;dv claims 30+ languages and is strong on sales-call analytics, with a CRM-facing feature set. Its iOS app sits around 2 stars, its Android app is a capture-first Lite build, and its free plan allows 10 AI summaries for the lifetime of the account. Run a low-stakes test before relying on it for a meeting you cannot repeat. See the tl;dv comparison.

Granola claims 30+ languages and captures Mac and Windows system audio with no bot sitting in the call, which some Finnish teams prefer for client work where an extra participant raises eyebrows. Its phone apps, Android included since July 2026, record a meeting held in a room. A video call still has to be captured on the computer, and the Business plan is priced per user. See the Granola comparison.

#7 Otter.ai has no Finnish

Otter gets its own section because it is the name most people reach for first, and because assuming it covers Finnish will cost you a subscription and a meeting.

Otter supports six languages: English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. Finnish is not among them, there is no automatic language detection, and there are no translated summaries. Its live English transcript, the one that appears on screen while people talk, is still the best in the category. None of that reaches a meeting held in Finnish. See the Otter.ai comparison.

Getting a cleaner Finnish transcript

1. 1Record five minutes of a real meeting before you pay anyone. Not a scripted test. Real speech, with the contractions, the interruptions and the English words in it.
2. 2Read the endings first, not the words. Pick three sentences that decide something and check the case endings: talossa against talosta, ensi viikolla against ensi viikolle. This is where an inaccurate transcript hides, because the sentence reads fine either way.
3. 3Check that ä and ö survived the export. Open the PDF or Word file, search for one word containing ä, and confirm it is intact. An app that handles them on screen can still mangle them in an export or a filename.
4. 4Put the phone flat in the middle of the table with nothing over the microphone. Finnish suffixes are short and unstressed, so they are the first thing background noise removes, and they are exactly the part carrying the meaning.
5. 5Do not ask people to speak kirjakieli. With an auto-detecting tool it is unnecessary, and it gives you a test that does not resemble your actual meetings.
6. 6Say names, dates and numbers clearly once, early on. Finnish numbers get heavily contracted in speech, so "kuusikymmentä" arrives as "kuuskyt", and fixing figures is where most correction time goes.

Bottom line

The Finnish problem is different from the Nordic ones next to it. Accuracy here is about suffixes and register: whether the tool returns what was said in puhekieli or a tidied written version, and whether the case endings that carry the meaning survive. Support for the language is the first gate, and recording a meeting that is not a video call is the last.

Otter fails the first one outright. Notta asks you to name the language before the meeting reveals itself. Fathom cannot record a room. Fireflies clears all three and charges per seat, with summaries on a credit meter. Noter AI clears all three on a flat $9.99 per month or $69.99 per year, with detection always on, language tagged word by word so "sovitaan, että palataan asiaan ensi viikolla" and the English sentence after it land in the same transcript, and notes you can read in English when the meeting was in Finnish.

Install it and run it on five minutes of your own audio, then read the case endings rather than the headline: Noter AI on the App Store. Android users can get it from Noter AI on Google Play.