Languages

What languages can MimicScribe transcribe?

Twenty-five, all on-device:

Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian.

The speech model is NVIDIA’s Parakeet TDT, running on the Neural Engine through CoreML. It is the same model for every language — there is no separate download per language, and no language pack to install.

Do I have to tell it which language I’m speaking?

No. There is no language picker for transcription, and nothing to switch when you change languages. The model reads whatever it hears.

What happens in a meeting that switches between languages?

A meeting that is mostly one language with occasional switching — a quote in Spanish, a German product name, a colleague answering in French — transcribes cleanly and stays searchable.

A meeting that is genuinely half in one language and half in another is a weaker case. Transcription still works, but everything downstream treats a meeting as having one language: the summary picks a single language, and the transcript is not tagged per segment. If you regularly run balanced bilingual meetings, expect the summary to land in the dominant one.

What language will my summary be in?

By default, the language the meeting was spoken in. That is the Same as meeting (Auto) setting, and it works by not constraining the model at all — it writes in whatever language it just read.

Your Mac’s system language is never a factor. A Spanish interface does not produce Spanish summaries of English meetings.

How do I set a summary language for all meetings?

Settings > Meetings > Meeting Recording > Summary Language. Pick Same as meeting (Auto), or any of the 25 languages to pin every new meeting to it — useful when you work in one language and report in another.

How do I change the language for one meeting?

Open the meeting, click the ••• menu, and choose Summary Language. The row shows what the meeting is currently in, and for an Auto meeting it names the language that was detected — “Auto (Spanish)“.

Picking a different language re-runs the summary in that language on the spot. It costs one AI call, and it rewrites the existing summary rather than re-transcribing anything — your transcript is untouched.

Two things to know:

• The choice sticks to that meeting. If you later edit a speaker name or regenerate the summary, it comes back in the language you picked, not the global one.
• Changing the global setting does not retranslate meetings you already have. It applies to meetings summarized after the change.

Which parts follow the summary language?

The summary, the overview, the meeting title, action items and their due descriptions, and the search tags.

Two things deliberately do not:

• Speaker names and action-item owners are never translated. “Søren” stays “Søren”; a name is data, not prose.
• Questions are answered in the language you asked them in. Ask the assistant something in English about a German meeting and you get an English answer. That holds both during the meeting and afterwards.

Is the app itself translated?

Yes — the interface ships in the same 25 languages, and it follows your Mac’s system language. There is no separate in-app language picker; change it in System Settings → General → Language & Region and MimicScribe follows.

Menus, settings, dates, durations and counts are all translated. Your own content is not: meeting titles, transcript text and anything the AI wrote stay in their own language, and placeholder speaker labels like “Speaker 2” are left alone because the app matches on them internally.

Will a Spanish interface retitle my English meeting’s notes?

No. An exported document is written in the meeting’s language, not your interface language. If your Mac is in Spanish and the meeting was in English, the note’s headings — Participants, Action Items, Transcript — come out in English, because that is the language of the thing you are exporting.

That covers vault notes, Markdown and TXT exports, Reminders and Calendar entries, webhook fields, and the markdown an agent gets back over MCP.

How are dates, times and numbers formatted?

Everything you read on screen uses your Mac’s locale — 12- or 24-hour clocks, day-month order, decimal commas, the local words for units in a duration, and non-Gregorian calendars where you use one.

Anything a machine has to read back stays fixed and identical in every language: subtitle timecodes in SRT and WebVTT files, CSV and JSON exports, note filenames, and the property values Obsidian and Logseq parse. A date field that another tool reads should not change shape because you switched your Mac to French.

Does search work in other languages?

Keyword search does, including accents — searching reunion finds “réunion”, and cafe finds “café”. You can also search dates in your own language: “letzte Woche”, “mardi dernier”, “прошлая неделя” all parse.

Meaning-based search needs a multilingual model that downloads in the background after you update. Until it finishes and you relaunch the app, meaning-based search over non-English meetings is poor — keyword search is unaffected throughout.

Two limits: there is no compound splitting, so searching “Abstimmung” will not find “Projektabstimmung”, and Chinese, Japanese and Korean are not supported by the search tokenizer.

Can I dictate and use Transform in other languages?

Yes. Insert and Transform use the same 25-language speech model, and the cleanup step keeps whatever language you spoke.

There is no language setting for either one, and no per-language prompt. Keeping your language is the model’s own behavior rather than a rule the app enforces — I tested adding an explicit instruction and it changed nothing except making the cleanup worse, so it is not there. If you want a specific behavior in a specific language, put it in the prompt for that dictation profile.

What doesn’t work as well outside English yet?

A few things work less well outside English. Three are worth knowing by name.

Danish, Dutch, Swedish and German real-word fillers are fixed for live meetings. The step that strips filled pauses (“um”, “er”) out of speech used to also take those letters when they were real words — “er” is Danish for “is”, Dutch for “there”, Swedish for “you” and German for “he”; “um” is German for “at/around” and Portuguese for “a/one”. “er” no longer gets treated as a filler at all, in any language. “um” now checks the row’s own detected spoken language before deciding: a German or Portuguese row keeps it, an English row still loses it.

That detection is automatic and per-row — there is nothing to turn on. It does not yet reach an imported file with no live recording behind it; that path still has no language signal, so an imported German “um” can still disappear. If you import files in one of these languages, play a turn back to check a line that reads oddly.

Greek: questions do not end sentences. Greek writes its question mark as ;, and the app only treats ., ? and ! as the end of a sentence. So a Greek question does not start a new paragraph, and sentence-level tidying does not fire at it. Nothing is lost — the words are all there — but the shape of a Greek transcript is worse than the others.

Greek: a dropped letter can shorten a word. The speech model’s vocabulary has no token for the Greek word-final sigma (ς), so it used to emit an unprintable placeholder there instead of the letter. The app now catches that placeholder at the end of a word and turns it back into ς, and it never prints the raw placeholder into a transcript. What it can’t fix is a word the model shortened some other way, with no placeholder left behind to catch.

On-device summaries cover six languages, not 25. If you route meeting AI to Apple’s on-device model, action items are found by a phrase scanner covering English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese. In the other nineteen the list comes back empty, and it reads like a meeting with no commitments rather than an error. The cloud path has no such limit.

The smaller ones:

• Custom vocabulary is matched by sound, and that matching is Latin-script only. Entries in Cyrillic, Greek or CJK are dropped from the dictation prompt rather than helping.
• Renaming a speaker by voice expects English phrasing (“that was Dana, not Speaker 2”). Renaming by clicking works in every language.
• The published accuracy numbers are English. The diarization and transcription benchmarks run on English corpora. I have not published non-English measurements, so treat the numbers on the technology page as English-only until I do.