Best Transcription Software for Southeast Asian Languages (2026)

The best transcription software for Southeast Asian languages depends on which language you speak and how much English you mix in. For Burmese and Burmese-English meetings, Loka Note and Tactiq are the tools to test. For Vietnamese, NoteMeeting publishes the most specific accuracy figures. For Thai, look at Soniox, Synogram Cloud and Audiee.ai. Fireflies.ai makes sense when you need one tool across many languages.

No tool wins everywhere, and most vendor accuracy claims are measured on clean audio. The sections below cover what is on offer, what each vendor says, and how to check it on your own recordings.

Why most transcription tools struggle with Southeast Asian meetings

Most reviews of meeting tools test monolingual English. Real meetings in Yangon, Bangkok or Ho Chi Minh City do not sound like that.

Three problems come up again and again:

• Code-switching inside a sentence. A speaker says a Burmese or Thai sentence and drops in "deliverable," "KPI" or a client name in English. Many engines either force the English word into local script or lose the sentence around it.
• Low-resource languages. Burmese gets far less training data than Indonesian or Tagalog, so tools that list it as one of a hundred languages often handle it poorly. We cover this in why Burmese-English code-switching breaks transcription tools.
• Pricing and privacy assumptions. Many tools bill in US dollars through a card form and send a visible bot into the call. In some teams a bot in a client meeting is awkward. In others, paying in dollars is the bigger obstacle.

Keep these three in mind while reading the vendor claims below.

Best transcription software for Southeast Asian languages: the short list

Here is how the tools compare on what each vendor publicly states. Blank or "not stated" means we found no claim, not that the feature is missing.

Loka Note's seven languages do not include Bahasa Indonesia, Malay or Filipino. If those are your main languages, Audiee.ai, Auris AI or Fireflies.ai are the ones to look at first.

Burmese and Burmese-English meetings

Burmese is the hardest case on this list, and the field is small. The tools that name Burmese are Loka Note, Tactiq and Auris AI.

Loka Note

Loka Note is built Burmese-first and handles mixed Burmese-English conversation, which is how most Myanmar business meetings actually sound. It records in the browser without a bot, or takes uploaded audio and video. Summaries come out in the language of the meeting, including Burmese, with decisions and action items separated. We built it, so weigh that accordingly. We cover the wider field in AI note takers for Burmese.

Tactiq

Tactiq lists real-time Burmese transcription, post-meeting summaries, action items and translation. Its page does not publish accuracy numbers for Burmese. Test it with a recording that includes English terms.

Auris AI

Auris AI covers 17 Asian-market languages, Burmese among them. It is pitched at marketers and subtitling, so it may suit content work better than recurring internal meetings.

For any Burmese tool, the main thing to check is whether English terms survive intact in the transcript and whether names and numbers come out right. Our guide on Burmese speech-to-text accuracy explains what realistic results look like.

Vietnamese meetings and regional accents

For Vietnamese, NoteMeeting publishes the most concrete numbers. Other tools list the language but say less about accents.

According to NoteMeeting, its engine, powered by Soniox, reaches a 5.4% word error rate on Northern, Central and Southern Vietnamese accents. It says this is 38% lower than Google STT. The company also publishes a feature page on its transcription. These are vendor-reported figures on the vendor's own test set, so treat them as a reason to test it, not as a guarantee.

NoteMeeting also offers two-way Vietnamese-to-English voice translation, with latency stated under 800ms. If your meetings involve a Vietnamese team and an English-speaking client in the same call, that is a different product category from note-taking, and it is worth a trial. Pricing starts at $6/month, with VND payment options. Local-currency billing matters for many teams, because card payments in dollars are a real barrier.

Alternatives for Vietnamese:

• Loka Note supports Vietnamese transcripts and summaries, with a localized page at lokanote.com/vn.
• Audiee.ai is a bot-free Mac app that covers Vietnamese along with Thai, Indonesian, Malay and Filipino.
• Fireflies.ai lists Vietnamese among its 100+ languages.

Thai and Thai-English meetings

Thai has plenty of tooling, and the useful question is how each tool treats English inside Thai sentences. Soniox notes that Thai is spoken by more than 70 million people across Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia and Malaysia. It positions its app for real-time Thai meeting transcription for business.

Two other options focus on mixed speech:

• Synogram Cloud gives speaker-separated transcripts and adaptive summaries in the browser, and lists support for Thai and English mixed in the same sentence.
• Audiee.ai is a Mac app with no bot. It keeps embedded English sentences as English instead of forcing them into Thai script, which helps when your transcripts feed into English-language documents.

Loka Note and Fireflies.ai also list Thai. The best pick here depends on whether you work on Mac, want real-time output, or need to share transcripts with people outside your team.

When a global tool like Fireflies.ai makes sense

A global generalist makes sense when your meetings span many languages and you want one tool and one bill. Fireflies.ai lists multilingual transcription in 100+ languages, including Thai, Bahasa Indonesia and Vietnamese, from $10/user/month.

The trade-off is depth. Breadth across 100+ languages does not tell you how a tool handles your accent, your jargon or your code-switching. If you are weighing it against alternatives, our Fireflies alternatives without a bot post covers what to check.

How to choose: dialects, bots and local pricing

Choose by testing, not by feature lists. A short trial on your own audio will tell you more than any vendor page.

1. Pick a real recording. Use five minutes from an actual meeting, with background noise and the way your team really talks, including English terms.
2. Include the hard parts. Make sure it has names, numbers, product terms and at least a few switches between languages.
3. Run it through two or three tools. Free trials or small top-ups are enough for this.
4. Read the transcript against the audio. Mark errors in names, numbers and English terms first. Those cause the most damage in meeting notes.
5. Check the summary, not only the transcript. Does it capture the decision and the owner? Our guide to action items from meetings covers what a good summary should contain.
6. Check the privacy model. Decide whether a bot in the call is acceptable to your clients. Botless options include Loka Note (browser recording) and Audiee.ai (Mac app). For more on how this works, see meeting transcription without a bot.
7. Check how you can pay. Local payment options such as NoteMeeting's VND billing can matter more than a few dollars of price difference. Also compare pricing models: per-seat subscriptions cost the same in a quiet month, while pay-as-you-go minutes do not.

Where Loka Note fits

Loka Note is the option for teams whose meetings are in Burmese, or in Burmese mixed with English. It is built in Yangon around real Myanmar meeting speech. It also supports English, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese (Simplified), Yoruba and Hausa.

It records in the browser with no bot, or accepts audio and video uploads. You get a transcript, a TL;DR, decisions, action items and open questions in the language of the meeting. "Ask Loka" lets you ask questions across all your past meetings, using your own transcripts. It integrates with Google Meet and Google Calendar. Recordings are kept for 6 months and you can delete them at any time. Security details are on the security page.

There are no plan tiers. Every account has the full feature set. You can buy minutes as one-time top-ups, from $1.99 for 60 minutes up to $39.99 for 3,000, valid for 6 months. Or you can pay $19.99/month for unlimited use. If you only need a language Loka Note does not cover, such as Bahasa Indonesia, one of the tools above will serve you better.

Try it on one of your own recordings: create a Loka Note account