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Cleft offers transcription in 82 languages. The 57 listed below have good accuracy against published speech-to-text benchmarks. US English gets the best results. The rest work, but have not been officially tested by us.

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Changing Your Language

Go to Settings → Recording and use the Transcription Language picker. This is the one place to choose the language you speak. The languages your device is set to, under Settings → General → Language & Region on iPhone and iPad or System Settings → General → Language & Region on Mac, appear first, in the same order. A divider follows, then every other language. Picking one confirms it straight away.
This picker moved out of General in v1.15.0. Transcription now sits in Settings → Recording, where you also choose which on-device model does the work. See Recording settings.
When you set up Cleft, the language step opens with your device’s language already selected, so most people just tap Continue. You can still pick any other language, and nothing is saved until you continue. If your device language is one Cleft cannot transcribe yet, the list opens with nothing selected. Your recording keeps the language you chose at the time you spoke it. New notes, rewrites, appends, and retries keep that language, even if you change this setting later, and changing it does not retranscribe earlier notes.

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Speaking more than one language

If you record in more than one language, open Settings → Recording → Languages I speak and tick each one. Your transcription language is already ticked. With two or more ticked, the recording screen shows a language button that lists only your languages, so switching takes one tap. Every other language is under More Languages in that menu. If you tick only one, the recording screen shows no language button. Your languages sync through iCloud to your other devices.

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Apple Watch

Apple Watch records in every language you can choose on iPhone, and your iPhone transcribes Watch recordings with the same models it uses for its own. Choose the language on your iPhone first; until you do, the Watch asks you to.

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Better accuracy for your language

If the built-in model handles your language poorly, the language step in setup shows one line inviting you to explore the transcription models in Settings afterwards. It appears only where Cleft’s measurements show another model can do better, and nothing downloads from that screen. See Model for the choices.

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Supported Languages

Based on published benchmarks, these 57 languages score below 50% word error rate (WER), the standard threshold for usable speech-to-text accuracy:
  • Afrikaans
  • Arabic
  • Armenian
  • Azerbaijani
  • Belarusian
  • Bosnian
  • Bulgarian
  • Catalan
  • Chinese
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Estonian
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Galician
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Kannada
  • Kazakh
  • Korean
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Macedonian
  • Malay
  • Marathi
  • Maori
  • Nepali
  • Norwegian
  • Persian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swahili
  • Swedish
  • Tagalog
  • Tamil
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Urdu
  • Vietnamese
  • Welsh
Languages not listed above may still return results, but you might see garbled output or mixed-language text. Want official support for another language? Let us know at support@cleftnotes.com.
Last modified on November 9, 2026