Polish meeting transcription: seven apps, honestly rated

The short answer

1. Noter AI: Polish is one of 60+ transcription languages, running through Soniox's unified model with automatic language identification on every recording. Diacritics come back intact, language is tagged word by word so Polish and English coexist, and Polish is one of the 18 languages the finished summary and action items can be read in.

2. Fireflies.ai: Polish sits within its 100+ languages with automatic detection, the broadest catalogue here, and its mobile app records in-person meetings as well as the bot covering calls. AI summaries are rationed by monthly credits and billing is per seat.

3. Notta: Polish is among its 58 languages, and its bilingual side-by-side view helps if you publish Polish and English versions of the same minutes. There is no automatic detection, so the language is a decision you make before the meeting.

4. Fathom: Polish is on Fathom's published transcript language list, and its free plan is the most generous of the seven. Online calls only, no audio import.

5. tl;dv: Polish is on its supported list, and its sales-call analytics lead the group. The iOS app hovers around 2★ and the free plan stops at 10 AI summaries for the lifetime of the account.

6. Granola: worth a close look here. Granola runs a Mac desktop app for virtual calls and iPhone and Android apps that record in person, with no bot anywhere, and Polish appears on its mobile language list only. Check which half of your meetings that actually covers before you plan around it.

7. Otter.ai: no Polish. Its six languages are English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. For a Polish meeting it is not an option at all.

Why Polish breaks transcripts

• Diacritics are letters, not decoration. Ą, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż, ć each change the word. Sad is an orchard and sąd is a court. Cześć is hello and część is a part or a share, and only one of those belongs in a contract summary. Any tool that returns stripped ASCII is producing a document a Polish reader has to decode.
• Some sounds have two correct spellings and only context decides. Ż and rz are pronounced the same, so może (maybe) and morze (sea) are audibly identical. The same is true of ó and u, and of h and ch. A model with a weak Polish language model will hand you a fluent sentence spelled wrong, which spellcheck will not flag.
• Seven cases reshape every noun, including names. Kowalski becomes Kowalskiego, Kowalskiemu, Kowalskim. Warszawa becomes Warszawy, Warszawie, Warszawą. Search across your archive breaks when the tool guesses the wrong ending, and the wrong ending is still a valid Polish word.
• Consonant clusters give models very little to hold on to. Wszystko, przedsiębiorstwo, bezwzględnie, wdrożenie. Four or five consonants in a row survive poorly on a phone microphone at the far end of a table, and Polish business vocabulary is full of them.
• Corporate Polish is heavily anglicised, and inflected. Zdeployować, przeklikać, zaapdejtować, plus straight borrowings like deadline, call, update and feedback. A tool locked to Polish before recording writes those phonetically, and a tool locked to English mangles the Polish grammar wrapped around them.
• Run five minutes of a genuine meeting through anything you shortlist. Accuracy claims are measured on clean read-aloud Polish and will not describe your meeting room.

All 7 apps compared

#1 Noter AI

Noter AI is this site's own app, so treat the position with suspicion and check the reasons, which are specific.

Polish comes back as Polish. Transcription runs on Soniox's unified speech model, which treats Polish as a full language in its own right. Diacritics are preserved, so sąd, część and wdrożenie land in the transcript the way a Polish reader expects to see them.

There is no language to choose. Automatic language identification is on for every recording, so nobody has to remember to switch from English to Polish before a call. On tools that require it, that is the setting people most often get wrong.

Polish and English in the same sentence both survive. Language is identified at the word level across the whole recording, so "trzeba to zdeployować przed callem" returns the Polish written in Polish and the English written in English. On a tool locked to one language, those decision-carrying words are the ones that come out invented.

Meetings without a video link still get recorded. Supplier visits, a client meeting in a Kraków office, a site walkthrough, an interview at a desk. Noter records from an iPhone, iPad or Android phone with one tap, keeps recording in the background, and imports audio you already have. If the meeting is on a screen, a bot joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Webex instead.

Polish notes from an English meeting, English notes from a Polish one. Polish is one of the 18 output languages, and translation applies to the executive summary, the detailed analysis and the action items as well as the raw transcript. A Polish delivery team can send an English summary to a client the same day without rewriting anything.

A single flat price. $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year, covering transcription, translation, summaries and action items. No per-seat billing, no monthly AI credit limit. 4.8★ on the App Store. A one-hour recording processes in roughly two minutes and returns speaker labels, timestamps and playback synced to the text. Audio and notes are encrypted in transit and at rest, and none of it is used to train AI models.

The honest limits. The ż/rz and ó/u pairs are the Polish failure mode on every tool including this one, because a wrong choice produces a correctly spelled Polish word in the wrong place. Case endings on client and company names also need a scan. And there is no web or desktop app and no CRM integrations. A permanent free tier is missing too, though roughly five minutes of your own Polish audio can be tested before paying.

#2 Fireflies: broadest coverage, priced per seat

Fireflies handles Polish inside 100+ languages with automatic detection, so it copes with anglicised corporate Polish and never asks you to declare a language up front. For a Polish company running everything through Teams or Zoom, with 50+ integrations pushing notes into a CRM, it is a serious option.

Why it sits second: AI summaries are limited by a monthly credit allowance even on paid tiers, and pricing is per seat, so a ten-person team pays ten times over. The mobile app does record offline meetings, though everything else about the product assumes a bot in a scheduled call. See the Fireflies comparison.

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

Notta lists Polish among 58 languages and its bilingual side-by-side transcript is the most polished implementation here, useful if Polish and English minutes of the same meeting both have to exist. The blocker is that it has no automatic detection, so Polish is selected before recording, and free sessions are capped at three minutes. See the Notta comparison.

Fathom publishes Polish on its transcript language list and has the best free tier of the seven. It records online calls only and cannot take in an existing audio file, so anything captured in a room is out of reach. See the Fathom comparison.

tl;dv lists Polish and is the strongest option if your focus is sales-call analysis. Its iOS app rating is around 2★ and the free plan allows 10 AI summaries for the lifetime of the account. See the tl;dv comparison.

Granola is the one to check carefully for Polish. It puts no bot in your meetings at all: the Mac desktop app captures system audio from virtual calls, and the iPhone and Android apps record meetings in the room. The wrinkle is that Polish sits on its mobile language list, while the half of the product that covers your Zoom calls is the Mac desktop app. Verify it against Granola's current documentation before you commit. See the Granola comparison.

#7 Otter.ai has no Polish

Otter earns a section of its own because it is the app people are told to use, and a language with 40 million speakers looks like something it would cover.

Otter supports six languages: English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified. Polish is absent, and there is no automatic language detection or translated summary. Its English live transcription remains the best in the category, which stops mattering the moment someone speaks Polish. See the Otter.ai comparison.

Getting a cleaner Polish transcript

1. 1Test five minutes of a real meeting first, with your own speakers and your usual English vocabulary mixed in. That tells you more than any comparison table, including this one.
2. 2Put the phone flat at the centre of the table, microphone clear. Consonant clusters like wsz- and przd- degrade fastest in muffled audio, and Polish business words are built out of them.
3. 3Check the diacritics in the first paragraph of the output. If ą, ę, ł and ż are missing there, they will be missing everywhere, and no amount of editing later is worth the time.
4. 4Proofread the ż/rz and ó/u words. They sound identical, so the model is guessing from context. These errors pass spellcheck because the wrong word is still a real Polish word.
5. 5Say client and company names clearly once, at the start. Polish declines names through seven cases, and anchoring the base form early cuts most of the correction work that follows.

Bottom line

Polish comes down to three checks: does the app support the language at all, does it return the diacritics and case endings correctly, and can it record a meeting that was never a video call?

Otter fails the first. Granola needs verifying on the platform you actually use, because its Polish listing sits on mobile while its virtual-call capture lives on the Mac. Notta asks for a language before the meeting has happened. Fireflies handles Polish well and bills per seat while metering your summaries. Noter AI answers all three, with automatic detection, word-level tagging for Polish mixed with English, in-person recording from a phone, and summaries and action items readable in Polish or English, at $9.99 a month or $49.99 a year. Test it on five minutes of your own audio and check the diacritics first.