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Vowen has three independent language settings. Changing one never changes the others. You can run the interface in Japanese, dictate in English, and have your meeting summaries written in French.

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Interface language

Eighteen locales. Each is listed in the picker under its own name, never an English label. The default is English. The change applies immediately with no restart; the application menu and the tray menu are rebuilt at the same time. Dates and times throughout the app follow the BCP 47 tag in the last column. The interface language can also be picked during onboarding, from the button in the top right of the onboarding window, and it is one of the preferences Cloud Sync carries between devices.
Translations are per language file, and the main app window has no per-string fallback to English. A string that has not been translated yet renders as its raw internal key, for example command_palette.placeholder. Menus, dialogs and notifications produced outside the main window do fall back to English.

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Dictation language

The default is Auto-detect. What the picker offers changes with the speech model you have selected, because different models support different languages. If you switch to a model that cannot handle your saved language, Vowen resets you to Auto-detect rather than sending a language the model cannot transcribe.

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Which models support what

Four families lock the selector outright: the English-only Whisper builds, all four Parakeet variants, Nemotron EN, and Ink 2. With those the picker greys out and explains why, and the settings row shows the language the model actually uses rather than whatever you had stored. Any cloud model without its own entry above falls through to the full 99-language Whisper catalog.

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The lists

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Assamese, Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Breton, Bulgarian, Burmese, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hawaiian, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Javanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malagasy, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Serbian, Shona, Sindhi, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Sundanese, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tajik, Tamil, Tatar, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, Yoruba.
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.There is no language to pick. Parakeet V3 detects and transcribes across all 25 on its own, which is why the selector is locked to Auto-detect.
Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian.The list is the set of codes with an entry in the model’s own prompt dictionary. Anything outside it silently falls back to the default prompt and decodes noticeably worse, which is why the picker will not offer it.
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.
Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese.
Arabic, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese.These are the languages Universal-3.5 Pro supports natively for streaming. File transcription falls back to Universal-2 for anything else.
Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish.
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh.
English, plus 22 Indian languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Maithili, Malayalam, Manipuri, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu.
Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Macedonian, Malay, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese.
Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.Speechmatics is the only model with an open picker and no Auto-detect option. You must choose a language.

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Overriding it

Dictation language can be overridden in two narrower places, both of which otherwise inherit the global setting:
  • Per tone: a tone can pin its own speech model and dictation language.
  • Notes recording defaults: meetings can use a different language from dictation.

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Auto-translate to English

A Pro toggle in Settings > Language, hidden whenever the effective dictation language is already English. How it works depends on the engine:
The Google Translate pass sends your transcribed text to Google. It runs after transcription and adds a short delay, which the settings row warns about for cloud models.Nemotron matches neither branch, so the toggle has no effect on Nemotron models.

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Summary language

The language your AI meeting-note summaries are written in, regardless of the language the meeting was held in. The default is Auto-detect, which means the summary matches the language of the transcript. Because it is not tied to a speech model, this picker always offers the full catalog: the union of every per-model list, 108 languages, sorted alphabetically by English name.

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Resolution order

1

The template's own override

Every summary template can pin a language in the template editor, including the built-in Meeting Notes template.
2

Your global Notes Summary Language

Used when the template has no override.
3

Auto-detect

Used when neither is set. The prompt tells the model to detect the primary language of the transcript and write everything (headings, section titles and body) in that language, and explicitly not to default to English.
When a language is pinned, the prompt instead instructs the model to write its entire output, including the title and every heading, in that language regardless of what was spoken.
If a custom template is present but your plan does not include custom templates, the template is ignored entirely, and so is its language override. The summary falls back to your global setting.

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American and British spelling

Settings > Language > English Spelling picks the spelling convention for English output. The default is American English. The row is only shown when your dictation language is English or Auto-detect, or when the model is one of the English-locked ones. Choosing British English runs the finished text through a static word-level dictionary of 1,692 American-to-British mappings. It applies only when the transcription language is en or auto. The dictionary is deliberately pruned relative to the upstream package it came from. A mapping is removed whenever the American form is itself accepted modern British English, because a context-blind converter must never introduce errors. Removed classes include:
  • Archaic British variants: instal, connexion, inflexion
  • Cases where British medical style prefers the American form: fetus, fetal, fetid
  • Forms that are not valid in any English: licenced, licencing
  • Homograph traps where the American form is standard British in a common sense: practice and practices as nouns, draft, program, disk, tire

Settings reference

Every row in Settings > Language and its default.

Interface language

Longer explanation of the UI language and how to change it.

Speech models

Which model to pick, and what each one costs.

Plan limits

Auto-translate is one of the Pro features.