Vietnamese Meeting Notes: Google Meet Won't Save Them — Here's What Will

Google Meet isn't bad at Vietnamese. It doesn't save it at all. Here is the real reason, how Memobot, Fireflies, Fathom and tl;dv compare, and which one fits your meetings.

Google Meet is not "bad at" Vietnamese. It does not save Vietnamese at all: Transcripts and Gemini's "Take notes for me" support 8 languages, and Vietnamese is not one of them. If your meetings are in Vietnamese, you need a separate notetaker. Pick Memobot for all-Vietnamese calls, Fireflies for calls that mix in English, and for the meetings that matter most, record the audio and run it through ElevenLabs Scribe or Gemini.

What is the real problem?

You spend an hour on a call with a client. Everyone speaks Vietnamese, with "deadline", "budget" and "landing page" dropped in along the way. Afterwards you open the notes and find a paragraph of meaningless English, or nothing.

So you replay the one-hour recording and type it up by hand. One meeting now costs two hours.

Most people assume Google's AI is weak at Vietnamese. The actual reason is different, and knowing it changes which tool you should pick.

Why doesn't Google Meet's recording capture Vietnamese?

Picture four assistants sitting in your Google Meet room. Two of them understand Vietnamese but have no pen. The two holding pens do not understand Vietnamese.

Google Meet's features against Vietnamese, compiled from the official help pages. Captions understand it and discard it; the features that save text don't support it. (Source: Google Meet Help, accessed 30 Sep 2026)

There are four reasons:

1. Saved transcripts have no Vietnamese. Google's help page lists exactly 8 languages for Transcripts: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish. Gemini's "Take notes for me" uses the same list. So the engine tries to fit Vietnamese sounds into one of those eight, and you get nonsense.

2. Live captions do support Vietnamese, but nothing is kept. Captions appear only for you, only during the call. When the meeting ends, they are gone.

3. A recording is only a video file. It stores picture and sound, not text. To get text you still go through Transcripts, which brings you back to reason 1.

4. One language at a time. Google states that "Take notes for me" does not yet support multiple languages in one meeting. Vietnamese professionals mix English into almost every sentence.

⚠️ This is a product limit, not a technology limit. In the benchmark table ElevenLabs publishes, Google's own Gemini model gets about 4.2% of Vietnamese words wrong on the FLEURS test set. Google can do it. It has not switched it on for Meet.

What makes Vietnamese hard for machines?

Even when a tool supports it, Vietnamese is a harder job than English. Three things cause most of the errors.

Tones. "Ma, má, mà, mả, mã, mạ" are six different words that differ only in pitch. Laptop microphones and compressed call audio blur exactly that information.

Three regional accents. Northern, Central and Southern speech differ in sounds and vocabulary. A model hears best the accent it was trained on most.

English mixed in. This is the interesting one. The ViMedCSS study found a trade-off: models tuned for Vietnamese do better on the Vietnamese parts and worse on the English words dropped in. Multilingual models such as Whisper do the opposite.

The better a model is at Vietnamese, the more it stumbles on embedded English. This medical test set is very hard, so the absolute numbers are high; the reversed order is the point. (Source: ViMedCSS, arXiv:2602.12911, chart redrawn by the author)

So "which tool is best" becomes a different question: are your meetings all Vietnamese, or heavily mixed with English?

The engine inside decides the accuracy

Every notetaker is a wrapper around a speech-to-text engine (the part that turns sound into words). However polished the wrapper is, if the engine mishears, the summary is wrong.

The yardstick is WER (word error rate, the share of words heard wrong). A WER of 10% means one word in ten is wrong. Lower is better.

On real-world Vietnamese audio, a Vietnamese-specialist model makes far fewer errors than the common multilingual engines. (Source: VietASR, arXiv:2505.21527, Table 3, chart redrawn by the author)

Two things to take from the chart:

• Whisper large-v3 has the most errors in this group (16.44% on average). Many international tools run on Whisper, so "supports 100 languages" does not mean it hears Vietnamese well.
• A model trained specifically for Vietnamese wins clearly (8.31%). That is why Vietnamese-built tools deserve a serious trial.

Newer engines do better still. ElevenLabs reports that Scribe reaches roughly 3.1 to 3.5% WER on Vietnamese in the FLEURS test.

ElevenLabs' self-published Vietnamese benchmark (two sections of the same page, joined). (Source: ElevenLabs)

⚠️ These are vendor-published figures on a test set of clean, read-aloud speech. A real meeting has noise, people talking over each other and poor microphones. Your number will be higher.

How the options compare

The Fireflies pricing page as I saw it on 30 Sep 2026, after my Free plan ran out. Note that "Multi-language mode" appears only in the Business column. (Source: author's screenshot)

What it costs you

The subscription is the small part. These three costs deserve more thought.

A bot joins the call. Fireflies, Fathom, tl;dv and Memobot all send a virtual attendee into the meeting. Your client will see it. Ask first; since April 2026 Google also lets admins require explicit consent for recordings.

Your data leaves the company. Meeting content goes to a third party's servers. For HR, finance or legal conversations, read the retention policy before you switch it on.

The feature you need sits one plan higher. For Vietnamese speakers this is the biggest trap.

Fireflies' own documentation: transcribing several languages in one meeting is limited to Business and Enterprise. (Source: Fireflies Guide)

⚠️ Fireflies Pro at $10 transcribes one dominant language per meeting. If your team speaks half Vietnamese and half English, the real price is $19, not $10.

When to use one

• You hold Vietnamese meetings three or more times a week. Each saves 30 to 60 minutes of typing, so the tool pays for itself in the first week.
• You need a record of who promised what. A timestamped transcript ends the argument after the meeting.
• Someone is regularly absent. A five-line summary replaces a repeat meeting.
• You serve Vietnamese-speaking clients. Getting their requirements down accurately is directly worth money.

When NOT to use one

• Sensitive meetings (pay, discipline, legal). Do not send them to a cloud service. Record locally and process it yourself, or take notes by hand.
• One or two meetings a month. Do not pay a subscription. Record and pay Scribe by the hour, or stay inside Memobot's free 90 minutes.
• Clients who dislike bots. An unfamiliar name in the room can sour the mood. Ask permission and record on your phone instead.
• You need word-for-word legal minutes. No tool reaches that standard in Vietnamese yet. A person still has to review.

The verdict: what I recommend

I have not measured each tool on your voice, and no independent ranking of meeting notetakers for Vietnamese exists today. Based on official documentation and research figures, these are my picks:

• Most accurate Vietnamese capture: record the meeting and run it through ElevenLabs Scribe (or Gemini). These engines have the best published Vietnamese numbers, at about $0.40 per hour. The catch is one manual step.
• Automatic, all-Vietnamese calls: Memobot. Built for Vietnamese, joins Meet, Zoom and Teams by itself, 100,000 VND a month.
• Automatic, heavily mixed with English: Fireflies Business. Budget for $19, because Multi-language mode lives there.
• Skip: Otter (no Vietnamese) and Google Meet's native Transcripts.

What to do next: take one 10-minute recording of a real meeting of yours, run it through two or three tools on their free plans, and count the errors in names and numbers. Those ten minutes are more trustworthy than any comparison table, including the one above.

FAQ

Can Google Meet take notes in Vietnamese? No, as of 30 Sep 2026. Transcripts and "Take notes for me" support 8 languages only. Live captions do support Vietnamese but are not saved after the call.

Are the free plans enough? Enough to test, not enough for daily use. Memobot gives 90 minutes a month, Fathom gives unlimited recording but 5 AI summaries, and Fireflies limits AI summaries and gives 800 minutes of storage.

What if my team speaks half Vietnamese, half English? Choose a tool with a multi-language mode inside a single meeting. On Fireflies that is the Business plan. Otherwise set the meeting language to Vietnamese and expect to fix English terms by hand.

Are Vietnamese-built tools better than international ones? For pure Vietnamese, the research favours specialist models. For sentences with English mixed in, multilingual models have the edge. There is no general answer, only an answer for your kind of meeting.

What do I lose by doing nothing? About an hour of typing for every hour of meeting, or the details themselves. If you rarely meet, that is an acceptable price.

References

• Use Transcripts with Google Meet, Google Meet Help
• Supported languages for Google Workspace with Gemini, Google Meet Help
• Use live captions in Google Meet, Google Meet Help
• VietASR: Achieving Industry-level Vietnamese ASR, arXiv
• ViMedCSS: A Vietnamese Medical Code-Switching Speech Dataset & Benchmark, arXiv
• Vietnamese Speech to Text, ElevenLabs
• Multi-Language Mode (Beta), Fireflies Guide
• What languages does Fathom support?, Fathom Help
• Otter supported languages, Otter Help
• Memobot, VAIS
• Which AI note taker supports which languages?, Routines

#GoogleMeet #Vietnamese #AIMeetingNotes #Fireflies #Memobot #SpeechToText

✍️ The Author: Do Ngoc Hoan Founder of CookConnects.ca & Wizy.ca. Bridging the gap between advanced algorithms and business execution. I write for technical founders looking to scale their impact with AI and robust engineering.

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