PHOENIX (AP) — Lawyers for former Phoenix Mercury interim coach Nikki Blue have filed a lawsuit against the organization, alleging unequal treatment based on race and gender, unequal pay based on race and that her employment was terminated in retaliation for complaints about unequal treatment.
The suit was filed on Thursday in U.S. District Court in Arizona.
Blue, who is Black, was hired in 2022 as an assistant coach and was named the team's interim coach in June 2023 after Vanessa Nygaard was fired midseason. Blue had a 7-21 record in the interim role.
Blue was not retained after the season. The Mercury hired Orlando Magic assistant Nate Tibbets, who is white.
The suit claims that Blue was paid $250,000 in her interim role, which was less than the $375,000 that Nygaard, who is white, was making. Tibbets is reportedly making more than $1 million per season.
Blue also claims that the Mercury organization set her up to fail, making roster decisions in 2023 that made the team noncompetitive.
“Despite her exemplary record and professionalism, Ms. Blue was cast aside, demeaned, and denied the opportunity to lead,” the law firm Mesidor PLLC, co-counsel on the case, said in a statement. “This lawsuit is not just about one woman’s career — it’s about the pervasive, institutional disrespect for Black women in sports leadership.”
One of Blue's lawyers is Sheree Wright, who has filed other suits against the NBA's Phoenix Suns and the Mercury in recent seasons.
“This is the fifth lawsuit brought against the organization by Sheree Wright, an attorney who has been disciplined twice by the Supreme Court of Arizona for committing numerous violations of the rules of professional conduct — including making false and unsupported allegations of racial bias against a judge," Suns and Mercury senior vice president of communications Stacey Mitch said in a statement.
"Like Ms. Wright’s other cases, this case is completely meritless. Ms. Blue was interviewed and considered for the head coach position, but didn’t get the position based on her performance as interim head coach, as well as her limited professional coaching experience.
“Sheree Wright’s continued abuse of the legal system for financial gain is unethical.”
AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/wnba-basketball
FILE - Phoenix Mercury WNBA basketball team interim head coach Nikki Blue speaks during a news conference, June 26, 2023, in Phoenix. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov 10, 2026--
Otter.ai, the company behind the leading AI notetaker and conversational knowledge platform, today announced the largest multilingual expansion in its history: 27 new languages, 13 available today and 14 coming soon, and multilingual transcription that recognizes and transcribes conversations as speakers move between languages, all within a single meeting.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20261109106339/en/
Global teams rarely work in just one language: Capterra’s 2024 Collaboration and Productivity Survey found that 42% of international knowledge workers named language barriers as one of their top challenges when collaborating. That’s why Otter is expanding now, and why it is doing so deliberately. Unlike other notetakers, Otter’s speech models are trained, tuned, and run by Otter on its own infrastructure, not wrapped around a third-party AI service, so each new language can be built with the accuracy teams need to trust their notes.
27 new languages
In addition to the four existing languages (English, French, Spanish, and Japanese), Otter now supports 13 new languages: Mandarin Chinese (Simplified), German, Italian, Cantonese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Indonesian, Malay, Dutch, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Polish.
Fourteen more are coming soon: Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Arabic, Hindi, Thai, Hebrew, Norwegian, Greek, Macedonian, Persian, Czech, Hungarian, and Romanian. Once all are live, Otter will support a total of 31 languages.
Meetings don’t stay in one language, and neither should the transcript. Coming soon, Otter’s multilingual option will follow conversations as they unfold, transcribing accurately as participants switch between supported languages, with no manual setting changes. For example, a sales call can move from English to Portuguese to Mandarin and back without anyone pausing to change a language setting.
Because Otter builds and runs each language model in-house, it can account for what makes each one distinct. In English benchmark testing, Otter averaged 96% accuracy on the Open ASR Leaderboard. Otter also does not send your audio to third parties for processing, a commitment that has held for over a decade and now extends to every new language as it becomes available.
A complete workflow in every supported language
Otter’s new languages work across the whole workflow, not just the transcript. Before the call, Work Mode, one of Otter’s newest capabilities, pulls past conversations and connected apps into a brief. During it, summaries, action items, speaker identification, AI Chat, and search work across supported languages. Afterward, Work Mode turns the conversation into follow-up emails and CRM updates, in whichever language the meeting happened.
“Many large international companies are already using Otter to improve collaboration and productivity for teams in different time zones and speaking multiple languages,” said Sam Liang, co-founder and CEO of Otter.ai. “We built our speech recognition in-house from the beginning, so we can build every language the right way, with leading accuracy and private audio. That’s what lets us bring 27 new languages to Otter.”
Availability
Users can select a supported language in their Otter settings. The new languages come at no additional cost across Otter plans and are available across desktop, mobile, and browser. For details on supported languages and how to select one, visit here. Don’t see yours? Request a language.
About Otter.ai
Otter.ai is the AI notetaker and conversation knowledge engine for the modern enterprise. With over 40 million users, including more than 86% of the Fortune 500, and 1 billion+ meetings transcribed, Otter captures, connects, and activates the knowledge from every conversation. Otter’s proprietary ASR and speaker identification, built in-house, deliver industry-leading accuracy, turning meetings into searchable intelligence, automated action items, and agentic workflows that sync directly to the tools teams already use. Backed by Spectrum Equity, Horizon Ventures, and Draper Associates, and most recently General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF) with $320 million in growth financing. Otter.ai is headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Korean leads 13 new languages available today, plus 14 more coming soon and transcription that keeps up when speakers switch languages mid-meeting.
