Vietnamese meeting transcription: which apps hold the diacritics

The short answer

1. Noter AI puts Vietnamese inside 60+ transcription languages with automatic language identification on every recording. Language is tagged word by word, so an English phrase inside a Vietnamese sentence stays English, and the summary and action items can be read in Vietnamese or another language.

2. Fireflies.ai covers Vietnamese inside 100+ languages with auto-detection, the widest catalogue on this page, and it records in person from its mobile app. AI summaries are capped by monthly credits.

3. Notta lists Vietnamese among its 58 languages, with a bilingual side-by-side view that suits Vietnamese-English biên bản họp. You pick the language before recording, which is a problem on a mixed call.

4. Fathom lists Vietnamese on its published transcript list and has the best free plan of anything here. Online calls only, no audio import, and its summary translation covers six European languages, none of them Vietnamese.

5. Granola lists Vietnamese on both its desktop and mobile language sets, which is more than most tools its size. No bot anywhere: the Mac desktop app captures system audio for virtual calls, and the iPhone and Android apps record meetings held in a room.

6. tl;dv lists Chinese, Thai, Indonesian and a long run of European languages, and Vietnamese is not on its published transcript list. Its Whisper option may pick it up on auto-detect, but that is not a documented commitment.

7. Otter.ai has no Vietnamese. Its six languages are English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese and Chinese Simplified, which leaves out any meeting held in Hanoi or Da Nang.

Why Vietnamese transcripts fail

• Six tones, all of them written. ma, mà, má, mả, mã and mạ are six different words with one shared spine. In a business context, bàn (discuss) against bán (sell) against bản (version) against bận (busy) all sit inside sentences that stay grammatical whichever one the model chooses.
• The diacritics are part of the spelling. Vietnamese uses ơ, ư, đ, ă, â, ê and ô on top of the tone marks, and a transcript that arrives stripped to plain ASCII leaves the reader guessing at every second word. ban lai could be four different things, and working out which one takes remembering the meeting.
• North and south are audibly different languages to a model. Hanoi keeps ch and tr apart, and s and x, in ways Saigon speech does not. Southern pronunciation softens v toward a y sound, so về often lands as something closer to dề, and it merges final n with ng and t with c. Training audio skews northern, so a Ho Chi Minh City meeting is the harder test.
• English sits inside the Vietnamese grammar. Em sẽ follow up với khách hàng sau buổi meeting. Job titles, product names, deadline, budget, KPI: all of it stays in English while the sentence around it stays Vietnamese. A tool locked to Vietnamese at record time writes those phonetically with Vietnamese spelling, and they are the words you go back to the transcript for.
• Money is spoken in triệu and tỷ. Hai tỷ ba means 2.3 billion đồng, compressed into three syllables. Mishear the unit and the figure is off by a factor of a thousand, which is a different class of mistake from a wrong word. Test five minutes of your own audio before you subscribe to anything on this page, and check the numbers first.

All 7 apps compared

Five of the seven support the language in some form, so column two settles less than it looks like it should. The separation happens in columns three and five: whether the app has to be told the language before a meeting that will run in two, and whether it can record a conversation that is not a scheduled call. Factory visits in Bình Dương, distributor meetings, a negotiation over coffee: none of those have a Zoom link.

#1 Noter AI

Noter AI is this site's own app, so read this section knowing that. The Vietnamese-specific reasons are checkable ones.

Nothing is chosen before recording. Transcription runs on Soniox's unified speech model with automatic language identification enabled on every recording. There is no Vietnamese or English selector to get wrong when a supplier call turns bilingual halfway through.

Both languages survive in one sentence. Language is tagged at the word level, so em sẽ follow up với khách hàng sau buổi meeting comes back with the Vietnamese properly accented and the English written as English. A tool committed to one language spells the other one out phonetically.

It records the room. Factory walkthroughs, distributor meetings, a conversation in the director's office, a client lunch. One tap on an iPhone, iPad or Android phone, a Control Center widget, or Siri, with recording continuing in the background. Audio files recorded some other way can be imported. For virtual meetings a bot joins Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Webex.

Vietnamese notes from an English meeting, or the reverse. The executive summary, detailed analysis and action items can be produced in another language, along with the raw transcript, and Vietnamese is one of the 18 output languages. A regional call in English can come back as Vietnamese notes the local team will actually read, and a Vietnamese meeting can go to head office in English.

Speaker labels and tappable timestamps. When a tone mark does look wrong, tapping the line plays that exact moment of audio back, which is faster than re-reading the sentence trying to guess which word was meant.

One flat price. $9.99/month or $49.99/year covers transcription, translation, summaries and action items, with no per-seat fees and no monthly AI credit caps. Rated 4.8★ on the App Store, and roughly two minutes of processing per hour of recording.

The honest limits. The bot joins Zoom, Teams, Meet and Webex, and it cannot join a Zalo call. For those, put the phone next to the speaker and record it in person, or import the audio file afterwards. Tone-mark errors on names, product terms and figures still happen on every tool here, this one included, and a strong southern accent in a noisy room is the hardest case. There is no web or desktop app and no CRM integrations. The free tier is not permanent either, though about five minutes of your own audio can be tested free first.

#2 Fireflies: the biggest catalogue, capped summaries

Fireflies has Vietnamese inside 100+ languages with automatic detection, so it copes with the English that fills Vietnamese business speech without being configured for it. With 50+ integrations, it is the strongest option for a company whose meetings all happen on Zoom or Teams and whose notes need to reach a CRM.

Why it is not first: AI summaries are rationed by monthly credits even on paid plans, pricing is per seat, and the summary stays in the language the meeting was held in. See the Fireflies comparison.

#3 to #6: the rest

#3 Notta carries Vietnamese in its 58 languages and its bilingual side-by-side transcript is the best in the category if your output is a Vietnamese-English biên bản họp. The structural problem is the same everywhere: no automatic language detection, so the language is fixed before the meeting shows what it is. Free sessions stop at three minutes and the AI training default uses your data on non-Enterprise plans. See the Notta comparison.

#4 Fathom lists Vietnamese and has the most generous free plan of anything here. It records online calls only, cannot import audio, and its automatic summary translation covers Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian and Dutch, so a Vietnamese meeting yields Vietnamese notes only. See the Fathom comparison.

#5 Granola lists Vietnamese on both its desktop and mobile sets and works without a bot at all. The Mac desktop app captures system audio for virtual calls, the iPhone and Android apps record meetings in a room, and chat with the notes is iPhone-only. What it will not do is give you the notes in any language other than the one spoken. See the Granola comparison.

#6 tl;dv does not list Vietnamese on its published transcript language list, despite covering Thai, Indonesian and Chinese. Its Whisper model may catch it on auto-detect, but an undocumented maybe is a poor basis for a subscription. The iOS app sits around 2★ and the free plan caps at 10 AI summaries for the account's lifetime. See the tl;dv comparison.

#7 Otter.ai does not support Vietnamese

Otter earns its own section because it is the name most people try first, and the assumption that a market leader covers a language with 90 million speakers is reasonable. It does not.

Otter supports six languages: English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese Simplified. Vietnamese is not among them, and Otter has no automatic language detection or translated summaries either. Its live English transcription remains the best in this comparison, and none of that quality reaches a meeting held in Vietnamese. See the Otter.ai comparison.

Getting a cleaner Vietnamese transcript

1. 1Test on five minutes of a real meeting, with the accents you actually work with. If your team spans Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, put both voices in the sample.
2. 2Phone flat in the middle of the table, nothing over the mic. Tone lives in pitch, and pitch is what a muffled recording loses first.
3. 3Read the tone marks on verbs before anything else. bàn against bán, gửi against giữ, and any word where one stroke changes a commitment.
4. 4Say figures with the unit, once, slowly. Hai phẩy ba tỷ is safer than hai tỷ ba when the number matters, because the compressed form is where the thousand-fold errors come from.
5. 5Leave the English alone. With an auto-detecting tool there is no benefit to forcing Vietnamese equivalents for deadline or KPI, and nobody will do it anyway.
6. 6For a Zalo call, record the phone. Put it on speaker, record it as an in-person session, or save the audio and import it.

Bottom line

Vietnamese support is more common than you would expect from the marketing, so the deciding factors sit elsewhere: whether the app has to be told the language in advance, whether it can record a meeting held in a room, and whether the notes can cross a language boundary once the meeting is over.

Otter has no Vietnamese and tl;dv does not list it. Fathom supports it but records online calls only. Notta has it and wants the language named before you press record, while Granola has it and will not put the notes into any language other than the one spoken. Fireflies covers the language well and meters the summaries. Noter AI covers all of it, with detection always on, word-level tagging for Vietnamese and English together, in-person recording from a phone, and summaries and action items that can be read in either language, at $9.99/month or $49.99/year.