Which Languages Does Granola Support? What Works and What Doesn't

You read about Granola in a newsletter, opened the site, and the pitch landed: AI meeting notes with no bot joining the call. Then a practical question showed up. Does it actually work in the language your meetings are held in?

Granola's transcription covers ten languages on desktop, and more on mobile, so the odds are good that yours is on the list. The part most reviews gloss over is a design decision that matters far more than language coverage. Granola never saves the audio or the video of your call. Whether that reads as a feature or a dealbreaker depends entirely on what you need your notes for.

Here's what the official documentation and pricing page actually say, split into what Granola does in your language and where it stops short.

Granola's official site, positioning the product as — Granola official site

Granola at a glance

What you're checking	Where it stands (August 2026)
Non-English transcription	Supported: 10 languages on desktop, including Japanese
Interface language	English only
Bot joining the meeting	None. It listens to your own system audio and mic
Audio and video saved	No. Nothing is stored, so there is nothing to replay
Free plan	Yes, but your meeting history is limited
Notion sync	Business plan, $14 per user per month
Platforms	macOS and Windows desktop apps, plus an iPhone app

How far does the language support go?

Transcription and summaries handle more than English

Granola's help center lists the languages available through the multi-language setting on macOS and Windows: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, and Hindi. The iOS and Android apps add several more, including Mandarin, Korean, and Vietnamese.

A meeting held entirely in any one of those languages transcribes and summarizes without trouble. There's no reason to rule Granola out on language grounds alone. Quality does vary by language, and English and the major European languages are where it's strongest.

No bot appears in the call, whatever the language

Granola's docs put it plainly with the line "There is no meeting bot," and explain that Granola runs only on your computer, using your system audio and microphone. Rather than joining as a participant, it listens to what your machine plays and what your mic picks up.

With bot-based tools like Notta, tl;dv, or Otter, a "Notetaker" row appears in the participant list, and you end up managing how the other side feels about it. That row never appears with Granola. In markets where recording a client call carries real etiquette weight, this is the feature people actually adopt it for. If that friction is what brought you here, we go deeper on the alternatives in Bot-Free AI Note Taker for Mac: Meeting Notes Without a Bot in Your Call.

Two conditions are worth knowing. Transcription requires the desktop app (macOS or Windows) or the iPhone app; the web interface at notes.granola.ai only views and edits notes that already exist. And no bot in the participant list does not mean recording without telling anyone. Consent and notice are still on you.

Note templates carry over to any language

Granola lets you customize note templates, so the shape your team expects (decisions, open questions, action items) can be set up in advance and reused. Templates are available on the free plan too.

Where Granola stops short

The interface is English-only

As of August 2026 the app UI ships in English only. For your own use that's a small thing. For rolling a tool out to a team that doesn't work in English day to day, it's one more layer of friction to price in, rather than discover after you've bought seats.

Mixing two languages in one meeting costs you accuracy

Granola picks a single language for the transcript, and its own guidance is to stay in one language per meeting. A call that switches back and forth produces noticeably messier output than one that doesn't. Recurring meetings with a mixed-language group are not where this tool is at its best.

Proper nouns are where transcripts really break

Language coverage is rarely what ruins a transcript. Company names, product names, and internal acronyms are. Every AI transcription tool mangles them, and non-Latin scripts add their own inconsistencies in how a name gets rendered. The workable habit is listing recurring terms in your template up front and fixing the handful of proper nouns after the call.

No audio, no video, so you can't go back and fix it

This is the real fork in the road. Straight from the documentation: Granola "does not record or save audio or video at any point during the call." Audio is transcribed in real time and discarded. What you keep is text.

As a privacy design that's a genuine strength. No meeting audio sits on your machine or in a vendor's cloud, which is exactly the posture some organizations want.

It becomes a constraint in four specific situations.

The situation	What happens
The summary came out thin or off-target	There's no source audio to regenerate from. You edit the text by hand or accept it
You need the exact wording of something someone said	You can't replay it. You're trusting the transcript
Someone needs the record for a handoff, an audit, or a disagreement	No primary recording exists
The screen share mattered, whether a deck, a demo, or a design	Video was never captured, so it's simply gone

Note how this compounds with the proper-noun problem above. The names most likely to be transcribed wrong are also the ones you can no longer go back and check.

Which surfaces a combination Granola can't cover: no bot in the call, but the recording still kept.

Keeping the recording without inviting a bot

Turn that list of limits around and you get the shortlist of what people in this position actually want: notes in their own language, no bot in the call, a free tier they can start on, and the recording still there afterward. If the language in question is Japanese, Qureco covers all four. It's a Mac screen recorder built on the same no-bot premise, recording on your own machine.

Qureco's recording screen, with separate mic and system-audio toggles and live level meters — Qureco official site

Three differences matter.

1. It's built for Japanese meetings first The app and the generated notes are in Japanese, which removes the "we're adopting an English tool" conversation when you hand it to a team.

2. No bot joins the call, same as Granola You record on your own Mac, so nothing appears in the participant list and nobody has to be asked about it mid-meeting.

3. The recording is yours to keep, on the free tier Recording and audio capture are free with no time limit and no watermark. Because the source file stays, a thin summary can be regenerated with extra instructions, a mangled company name can be checked by replaying the moment it was said, and shared decks and demos survive as video.

The Pro plan, which adds AI meeting notes and Notion sync, is $9/month at launch pricing, with the first month free and no credit card required. Set that against the pricing in the next section and the gap for Notion sync specifically is a wide one.

One caveat: Qureco is macOS-only today, with a Windows version in development. If your requirement is one tool for a mixed-OS team, Granola meets that and Qureco doesn't.

Download Qureco for Free

Pricing and the free plan

Now for Granola's own numbers, from the official pricing page:

Plan	Per user, per month	What it covers
Basic	$0	AI notes, AI chat, shared folders, templates, multi-language, with limited meeting history
Business	$14	Unlimited history, Notion / Slack / HubSpot / Zapier integrations, API, MCP, user management
Enterprise	$35	SSO, org-wide controls and auto-deletion, audit features

Two things to flag. First, the free limit lands on history rather than features. The official wording is "limited meeting history" with no published number, and reviews report roughly 25 notes. It's plenty while you evaluate, and it becomes the wall the moment you start going back through past meetings.

Second, Notion sync starts at Business, $14 per user per month. If your whole reason for adopting a notetaker is getting meeting notes into Notion, that use case isn't in the free tier. The pricing page also lists monthly billing only, with no annual option. To compare against Notion's own built-in feature first, Notion AI Meeting Notes vs Third-Party Tools covers that side.

Choosing between them

What you're weighing	Granola	Qureco
Non-English transcription	10 languages on desktop	Japanese
Interface	English	Japanese
Bot in the call	None	None
What you're left with	Text notes only	The recording plus generated notes
Replaying, regenerating a summary	Not possible, no source audio	Possible, straight from the recording
Screen-share content	Not captured	Kept as video
Free tier	AI notes with limited history	Unlimited recording, no watermark
Notion sync price	From $14/mo (Business)	From $9/mo (Pro)
Platforms	macOS, Windows, iPhone	macOS (Windows in development)

Granola is the better fit if you take your own notes during calls and want AI to shape them, if your team spans Windows and Mac, and especially if not storing audio is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation. The way typed notes and AI structure merge in one surface is genuinely well built.

Qureco is the better fit if your meetings run in Japanese, if you replay them, if you'd rather regenerate a weak summary than rewrite it, if the shared screen carries as much information as the conversation, or if you want Notion sync without a $14 seat.

If you want to keep comparing before you decide, these go deeper:

For the full workflow from recording to notes to Notion, How to Manage Meeting Notes in Notion with AI
To see the broader field side by side, Meeting Transcription Tools Compared for 2026

Frequently asked questions

Can the free plan produce notes in languages other than English? Yes. Multi-language support is included in the free Basic plan. The limit applies to how much meeting history you can access, not to the languages available.

Will a localized interface ship? No public announcement covers this as of August 2026, so plan around an English UI.

If no bot shows up, is it fine to record quietly? No, those are unrelated questions. A tool being invisible in the participant list says nothing about whether you have consent. Say you're recording at the start of the call. That holds for bot-based tools and on-device capture alike.

Can I run Granola and a recorder at the same time? You can. Taking notes in Granola while a recorder keeps the file is reasonable if you like Granola's note-taking surface. Since both are handling the same audio, try one on its own first and see whether it already covers you.

Wrapping up

Language: transcription and summaries cover ten languages on desktop, including Japanese, and no bot appears in the call regardless of language
Where it stops: the interface is English-only, mixed-language meetings lose accuracy, proper nouns get mangled, and no audio or video is ever saved, so you can't replay, regenerate, or produce a primary record
Pricing: the free plan caps history, and Notion sync begins at $14 per user per month, billed monthly only

It comes down to one question: what do you need to still have after the meeting? If text is enough, Granola is a polished answer. If you'll want to listen back, rebuild the summary, or keep what was on screen, choose something that keeps the recording, and you can do that without ever adding a bot to the call.