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. Pricing is per seat.

3. Notta. 58 transcription languages and a bilingual side-by-side view, held back because its help docs have you pick the language first. You commit to Finnish before the meeting starts. Check the current list covers it before paying.

4. Fathom. 38 languages. Online calls only, so a Finnish meeting held in a room is out of reach.

5. tl;dv. Claims 30+ languages and has a phone app that records audio only while you read the notes on the web.

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

In Noter AI, a Finnish meeting gets its summary in Finnish automatically, or in English or another language you choose, and the transcript translates into Finnish.

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.

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, transcript translation 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.

Summaries in Finnish or English. A Finnish meeting gets its summary in Finnish automatically, or in English or another language you choose, and the transcript translates into Finnish, one of 46 translation languages. There's a free plan to try the app, and a free trial on every subscription, so you can test your own audio 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, per-seat pricing

Fireflies covers Finnish inside 100+ languages with automatic detection, so it does not force a choice before recording. Coping with English mixed into the same meeting needs its Business plan (Multi-Language Mode, in beta). Its mobile app on iOS and Android records in-person conversations, which older reviews still claim it cannot do. Pricing is per seat.

Why it is not first here: in-person recording is the thinner half of a product built around a bot and a browser, and billing is per seat at roughly $10 to $19 per seat per month billed yearly. 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. Its help docs have you set the transcription language before recording starts, and a Finnish meeting captured as Swedish returns nonsense. Free sessions stop at three minutes. Confirm Finnish is on the live list before subscribing. See the Notta comparison.

Fathom has 38 languages, and it only records online calls. It cannot import an audio file and has no phone app to 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. Its phone apps only record (you read transcripts and summaries on the web), and its free plan gives full AI notes on just 10 meetings. 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. Its phone apps, on iPhone and Android, 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, and there is no built-in summary translation. 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 has no phone app to record a room. Fireflies clears all three (mixing needs its Business plan) and charges per seat. 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.