The best app for transcribing Arabic meetings in 2026

The short answer

1. Noter AI — transcribes Arabic as part of 60+ languages with automatic detection, handles Arabic-English mixing in the same conversation, records in-person meetings from a phone, and translates the summary and action items into English (or 16 other languages).

2. Fireflies.ai — supports Arabic within 100+ languages with auto-detection. Strong, but online calls only and its AI summaries are rationed by credits.

3. Notta — Arabic is in its 58 languages, but you must select it before recording, which is a real problem for a mixed Arabic-English meeting.

4. Fathom — Arabic falls within its 25+ languages; online calls only.

5. tl;dv — claims 30+ languages including Arabic; weak mobile app.

6. Granola — claims 30+ languages; Mac-first, so only useful at a desk.

7. Otter.ai — does not support Arabic at all. Its 6 languages are English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese Simplified. If you work in Arabic, Otter is not an option regardless of its other strengths.

Why Arabic is harder than the language lists suggest

• Code-switching is the norm, not the exception. Gulf and Levantine business meetings routinely mix Arabic and English within a single sentence — technical terms, product names, numbers. A tool that commits to "Arabic" when you press record will transcribe the English phonetically, and vice versa. This single issue ruins more Arabic transcripts than accent or audio quality.
• Dialects differ enormously. Gulf, Egyptian, Levantine, and Maghrebi Arabic are far apart, and most models are trained heaviest on Modern Standard Arabic — which is closer to how people write than how they talk in a meeting.
• Right-to-left text breaks layouts. Mixed Arabic-English lines render badly in tools that never seriously tested RTL.
• Names transliterate inconsistently. The same person can appear three ways across one transcript, which weakens speaker labels and search.
• Support is often nominal. "Arabic" appearing on a language list tells you a model exists, not that it's good. Test with your own audio before subscribing to anything — that advice applies to every app on this page.

All 7 apps compared

#1 — Noter AI

[Noter AI](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/noter-ai-meeting-note-taker/id6747296459) is the app this site is about, so weigh this accordingly — but the reasons it suits Arabic work are specific.

Nothing to set before you record. Transcription runs on Soniox's unified speech model with automatic language identification enabled on every recording. You don't choose Arabic, and you don't have to predict whether a meeting will be in Arabic, English, or both.

Arabic-English mixing works. The model tags language at the word level rather than committing the whole recording to one language, so a sentence that runs from Arabic into an English technical term and back comes out as one coherent transcript. This is the single biggest practical difference for Gulf and Levantine business meetings.

It records the room. A great many Arabic-language meetings happen in person — a majlis, a client's office, a site visit, a family business — not on a scheduled Zoom call. Noter records those directly from your phone with one tap. Fireflies, Fathom, and Otter cannot capture them at all.

English summaries from Arabic meetings. The executive summary, detailed analysis, and action items can all be read in English — not just the raw transcript. That's the practical need when the meeting is in Arabic and the report goes to a head office that reads English.

The interface is available in Arabic, and it's rated 4.8★ on the App Store. Pricing is $9.99/month or $49.99/year flat, with no per-seat fees.

The honest limits. Arabic dialect accuracy varies with how far the speech is from Modern Standard Arabic, and heavy dialect plus poor room audio will still produce errors — that's true of every tool here. There's also no web or desktop app, no CRM integrations, and no permanent free tier, though the free version lets you test roughly five minutes of your own Arabic audio before paying. That test is worth doing.

#2 — Fireflies: widest coverage, video calls only

Fireflies handles Arabic within its 100+ language catalogue and auto-detects, so like Noter AI it doesn't force a choice before recording and can cope with mixing.

For an Arabic-speaking team whose meetings are entirely on video — a distributed company running on Zoom or Teams — it's a strong option, with 50+ integrations if the output needs to reach a CRM.

The limits for this use case: no in-person recording at all, AI summaries rationed by monthly credits, and per-seat pricing. See the Fireflies comparison.

#3–#6 — the rest

Notta includes Arabic in 58 languages and has a genuinely useful bilingual side-by-side transcript view — attractive if you produce Arabic-English documents. But it has no automatic language detection: you pick the language before recording, which is exactly the wrong shape for a mixed Arabic-English meeting. See the Notta comparison.

Fathom lists Arabic among 25+ languages and has the best free plan in the category, but records online calls only and can't import audio files. See the Fathom comparison.

tl;dv claims 30+ languages including Arabic. Its iOS app is rated around 2★ and its free plan caps you at 10 AI summaries for the life of the account. See the tl;dv comparison.

Granola claims 30+ languages and is excellent at what it does, but it's a Mac desktop app — useful for Arabic meetings taken at a laptop, useless for those held anywhere else. See the Granola comparison.

#7 — Otter.ai doesn't support Arabic

This deserves its own section because Otter is one of the best-known names in the category and people reasonably assume it covers Arabic. It doesn't.

Otter supports six languages: English (US and UK), Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Chinese Simplified. There's no Arabic, no auto-detection, and no translation of summaries. Its live transcription is genuinely the best in the category — for English. For Arabic work it isn't a partial fit, it's not a fit. See the Otter.ai comparison.

Getting a better Arabic transcript

• Test with your own audio first. Record five minutes of a real meeting with your actual dialect, room, and mix of Arabic and English. Every claim on every vendor's language page is less informative than one test.
• Put the phone flat on the table, middle of the room, nothing covering the mic. Audio quality affects Arabic accuracy more than it affects English, because there's less margin in the model.
• Say names clearly early on. Arabic names transliterate inconsistently; hearing them clearly once helps speaker labels stay consistent.
• Don't fight the mixing. With auto-detecting tools you don't need to ask people to stay in one language — and asking usually fails anyway.
• Closer to Modern Standard Arabic transcribes better, but nobody runs a meeting that way. Expect more errors with heavy dialect and budget a minute to correct names and numbers.

Bottom line

For Arabic meetings the decision is mostly made by two questions: does the tool cope when English gets mixed in, and can it record a meeting that isn't a video call.

Fireflies answers the first well and the second not at all. Notta answers neither cleanly. Otter doesn't support Arabic. Noter AI answers both — automatic detection with word-level language tagging for mixed Arabic-English speech, in-person recording from the phone in your pocket, and English summaries and action items from an Arabic conversation, at $9.99/month or $49.99/year. Test it on five minutes of your own audio before deciding.