Can a notetaker transcribe a meeting that is half French and half English?

A meeting that is half French and half English is a problem for any notetaker that relies on the platform's captions: the captions can follow only one of the languages, and the notes inherit whatever they got wrong. This answer is for consultants, developers and anyone else whose Google Meet or Microsoft Teams calls switch between French and English, and who want one readable transcript and one set of notes. The full explanation is on automatic language detection.

Why do captions struggle with a bilingual meeting?

Because they decode one language per meeting. Google Meet and Teams captions are set to one spoken language, so in a French and English call one half is decoded correctly and the other half is forced through a decoder that expects the wrong language. The English half reads well; the French half reads like nonsense, or the other way round. More in why meeting captions pick one language.

How does TrackHeros handle the switch?

It notices the second language and sends the meeting to a second pass over the recording. Nothing has to be set: the meeting's language is worked out from the captions, a short audio sample and, when needed, the full recording. Listing French and English as the languages a client speaks is optional. A recording with French in it goes to a Whisper model, run by DeepInfra, Together AI or Groq through OpenRouter, that detects the language spoken itself.

The result is then rendered into English line by line:

• Each line is translated on its own and keeps its speaker and timestamp.
• English lines are kept as they were said.
• A line that fails to translate keeps its original French text rather than disappearing.
• Speaker names come from the platform captions: the captions say who, the audio says what. A line that cannot be attributed is labelled "Unknown".

Switching in the middle of a sentence is the hard case, and it is covered in when a meeting switches language mid-sentence.

What language are the notes in?

The one you choose: French, English, or any of the other notes languages. The summary, decisions, action items and minutes are written from the English transcript in the language set for your account, the client, the recurring meeting or that one call — the most specific setting wins. "Same as the meeting" picks French when French took most of the speaking time, and English when English did. PDF, Google Doc and Notion exports then carry French headings and French dates. More on this in English notes, or notes in your language, from a meeting in another language and on the French page.

The transcript itself stays in English, and the transcript page carries one line about it, such as "Translated to English from a conversation held in French and English."

How sure can I be that the French came through?

There is no accuracy figure for French, or for any other language, and TrackHeros does not publish one. A French and English meeting goes through exactly the same path as a Spanish and English or a Hindi and English one; the full list of languages recognised is on the languages page.

So for your first few French and English meetings, play part of the recording beside the transcript and check that the French lines came through. If a transcript is unusable, the Summary tab says "This transcript could not be read reliably" rather than inventing content, and the recording is there to fall back on.