Cleft officially supports US English and is optimized for US English voice recognition using the Whisper model. While the underlying Whisper model has the capability to work with other languages, we only officially support and test with US English at this time.

Language Settings

  1. Open Settings in the Cleft app
  2. Navigate to Language Settings
  3. Select US English for the best experience
  4. Or choose auto-detect if you want to experiment with other languages

While the Whisper model can work with other languages, we recommend using US English.

Language Support

While the underlying model was trained on 98 languages, we only list the languages that exceeded <50% word error rate (WER), which is an industry standard benchmark for speech to text model accuracy. The following 57 languages meet this quality threshold:

  • 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

Note: The model will return results for languages not listed above, but the quality will be low.

Best Practices for Voice Recognition

For optimal transcription results:

  1. Speak clearly at a natural pace
  2. Record in a quiet environment
  3. Position your device’s microphone close to you
  4. Use US English for the most accurate results

Request Language Support

We value your input! If you’d like to see official support for a specific language:

  1. Email us at support@cleftnotes.com
  2. Include “Language Request” in the subject line
  3. Tell us which language you’d like to see supported
  4. Share how you plan to use Cleft with this language