No notetaker could handle OFZ’s multilingual meetings. Then they tried HappyScribe

OFZ, a.s. is a ferroalloy producer based in Slovakia with operations in Uzbekistan and Angola. The company has been producing raw materials for the steel industry since 1953, and today its products include metallic silicon, the starting point in the microchip value chain. With around 100 employees and a lean team focused on doing more with less, OFZ needed to automate wherever it could, starting with the hours lost to manual meeting minutes.

The multilingual grapevine challenge

With teams spread across Slovakia, Uzbekistan, and Angola, a single meeting can switch between Slovak, Russian, English, and Portuguese, sometimes with one person explaining a point in one language and repeating it in another for the rest of the room.

“We use Slovak, we use Russian, and we use English in daily communication. And sometimes meetings are also in two languages. So we start with Slovak and then switch to English.”

On top of that, they used to take meeting notes manually.

“We wasted a lot of time writing down what we agreed on. Many times when somebody was taking the notes, it took a long time to send them, and it was always very much dependent on what the person remembered or wrote down.”

Branislav Klocok, General Director at OFZ

The company needed meeting minutes with clear action items that could be shared with both internal teams and external partners. And they needed it to work across all their languages.

A multilingual company needs a multilingual notetaker

Branislav tested around half a dozen tools before landing on HappyScribe. The evaluation was quick but decisive.

“We started with Otter, which everybody tries, but Otter is basically only for English. Other languages are not possible,” he said. Fireflies, Amberscript, and Whisper were also considered, but each fell short on multilingual support too.

A European company needs an EU-based provider

Beyond language capabilities, one factor proved non-negotiable: data residency and compliance. OFZ is classified as critical infrastructure in several countries, which means regular security audits and strict adherence to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Meeting recordings contain sensitive business decisions, so the provider had to meet the same standards OFZ holds itself to.

“We didn’t want to use American or Chinese software because of data protection. Working with a European and GDPR-compliant company was important to us,” Branislav explained.

The only notetaker that passed OFZ’s checklist

HappyScribe checked all the boxes. The AI Transcription handled multilingual meetings accurately, detecting language switches and translating everything into English. Branislav was surprised by the quality.

"We had a meeting in English, Slovak, and Russian, and it correctly detected all three languages, translated everything into English, and wrote good meeting minutes," he shared. And the accuracy keeps getting better: "HappyScribe’s language recognition is very good, it's improved a lot. We do have meetings where people speak in different languages and the software is dealing with it much better than in the past."

But the real game-changer was Chat, HappyScribe’s built-in AI chat feature. Instead of manually formatting meeting minutes from raw transcripts, the team pastes a detailed prompt into Chat to extract meeting minutes, add action items, and skip information not related to work. Chat generates a reliable, structured document ready to share.

“I cut down the time I would need to work on the post-processing of a meeting from half an hour or one hour to maybe five minutes,” Branislav said.

Beyond the meeting room

OFZ found two more use cases that nobody planned for.

The first is voice-recorded visit reports. When employees meet a client and don’t have time to write things down, they use the HappyScribe mobile app to dictate what happened while driving back. “When I have a meeting with someone outside, instead of writing down what we agreed on, I just switch on the HappyScribe app and dictate what I remember from the meeting,” Branislav explained. Chat turns the recording into a structured report.

The second is subtitling internal video manuals. OFZ uses video to document processes, including for ISO certification, and HappyScribe generates subtitles in multiple languages. “With subtitles we can actually make it very easy to put another language into the game,” Branislav said.

From pilot to company-wide adoption

What started as a one-person pilot is now used across the organization. “Today, actually almost all our meetings are being recorded with HappyScribe,” Branislav said.

Adoption happened organically. The tool solved a real problem (slow, unreliable meeting minutes), and once people saw the results, they started using it on their own.

“In terms of value, I think HappyScribe is probably number one in the market.”

Branislav Klocok, General Director at OFZ

Looking ahead, Branislav is already building automation around HappyScribe, connecting it to OFZ’s ERP system so that action items from meetings flow directly into task management. “The idea is to delegate as many things to AI as we can and just oversee the tasks,” he said.

Results in a nutshell

• Meeting processing cut from 30-60 minutes to five: Chat generates structured minutes with action items from raw transcriptions, replacing slow manual note-taking.
• Multilingual meetings handled accurately: English, Slovak, Russian, and Portuguese detected and transcribed in a single meeting, with quality that keeps improving.
• Three use cases, one platform: Meeting minutes, voice-recorded visit reports via the mobile app, and multilingual video subtitles for internal manuals and ISO documentation.
• Company-wide adoption: From a one-person pilot to every meeting minute owner using HappyScribe across the organization.
• GDPR compliance built in: As a European company, HappyScribe met OFZ’s strict data residency and compliance requirements.