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The best voice dictation apps for non-English languages

Updated July 11, 2026 · by the Lipo team

If you dictate in English, you are spoiled for choice. Almost every dictation app on the Mac does a respectable job with an American accent and everyday vocabulary. Switch to Spanish, Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, or French, and the picture changes fast. Names come out mangled. Grammar falls apart. The app quietly "corrects" your sentence into something you never said.

We build Lipo, a dictation app made specifically for this problem, so read this guide knowing where we stand. We have tried to be straight about what each tool is genuinely good at, because the fastest way to lose your trust would be to pretend the alternatives are useless. They are not. They are just built with different priorities.

What actually matters in a non-English dictation app

A language appearing in a supported-languages list tells you very little. Plenty of tools "support" sixty languages the way a vending machine supports nutrition. Before you commit to anything, judge it on five things:

• Accuracy in your language, not the demo language. Test it with real names, place names, and the way you actually speak, accent included.
• What happens after transcription. Raw speech is full of false starts and self-corrections. A good tool cleans that up in your language. A basic one hands you a transcript to edit by hand, which defeats the point.
• Speed. If you wait ten seconds after every sentence, you will stop using it within a week.
• Translation. Many people who dictate in one language need to send the text in another. This is where almost every tool on this list falls down.
• Privacy. Know where your recordings go and how long they live there.

The short version

1. Lipo

Lipo exists because we kept hitting the same wall: dictation apps that were excellent in English and an afterthought everywhere else. So we tuned it the other way around. Spanish, Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, French, and the rest of our 50+ languages are the point, not a checkbox.

Three things make it different in daily use:

• Cleanup that understands your language. When you say something, change your mind mid-sentence, and correct yourself, Lipo applies the correction instead of transcribing the mess. You get polished text, not a transcript. This works in your language, not just English.
• Translation as a first-class feature. Speak in one language and paste in another. Think in Bangla, send the email in English. Because cleanup and translation happen together, the output reads like something you wrote, not like machine output. None of the other tools on this list can do this properly, which is exactly why we built it.
• It is fast. Pro Starter and Pro Plus use realtime transcription, so text is ready almost as soon as you stop talking.

It works in any Mac app you can type in, keeps your history and recordings on your Mac, and includes screenshots, clipboard history, a custom dictionary for names and jargon, and Visual Brief, which turns a narrated screen recording into a structured prompt for AI coding tools.

Pricing starts at $7.99 a month for Pro Starter with 50+ languages and translation. Pro Plus at $12.99 adds unlimited translation and more Visual Briefs. There is a 7-day free trial with no card required.

2. Apple's built-in dictation

Start here if you have never dictated before, because it is free and already on your Mac. It runs on-device, which is great for privacy, and for short English notes it is perfectly serviceable.

Its limits show up quickly in other languages. You get raw, literal transcription with no cleanup, so every "umm" and abandoned sentence lands in your document. Punctuation must be spoken as commands. Accuracy varies a lot across languages, and there is no translation at all. It is a fine notepad companion and a frustrating tool for real writing.

3. superwhisper

superwhisper runs Whisper-family models locally on your Mac, which means broad language coverage and strong privacy, since audio never has to leave your machine. If offline processing is a hard requirement for you, it deserves a serious look.

The tradeoffs are the ones that come with the approach. Output is closer to a transcript than to finished writing, so non-English text tends to need a manual pass. Whisper's built-in translation only goes one direction, into English. And local model quality depends on your hardware: the larger, more accurate models want a recent, well-equipped Mac.

4. MacWhisper

MacWhisper is best understood as a transcription studio rather than a dictation tool. It shines when you drop in a recording, a meeting, a lecture, a voice memo, and want a text version, with good language coverage from the same Whisper lineage.

For dictating into whatever app you are working in, all day, it is not really built for that workflow, and the same raw-transcript and English-only translation limits apply.

5. Wispr Flow

Wispr Flow is a polished product with a lot of fans, and it made dictation feel modern for many people. It earned its reputation on English writing, and that is still where it feels strongest. If you write mostly in English and occasionally in another language, it may serve you well.

If your daily writing happens in Bangla, Hindi, Arabic, or Spanish, test it against your own speech before subscribing, and note that translating your dictation into another language is not a workflow it is built around.

How to test any of these in ten minutes

1. Dictate a real paragraph you would actually send, in your language, at your normal speaking pace.
2. Include two or three proper names: people, places, your company.
3. Correct yourself once mid-sentence, the way you naturally would.
4. Count the edits you need before you could send it. That number is the only benchmark that matters.

Whichever tool leaves you with the fewest edits in your language wins. We think that will be Lipo more often than not, and the free trial means finding out costs you nothing.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best dictation app for languages other than English?

It depends on which language you speak and what you need the text for. Lipo was built specifically for non-English dictation, with AI cleanup and translation across 50+ languages, and it offers a 7-day free trial so you can test it with your own voice. Apple's built-in dictation is a free starting point, and Whisper-based apps like superwhisper suit people who need offline processing. The right answer is whichever tool needs the fewest edits in your language.

Can Apple's built-in Mac dictation translate what I say?

No. Apple's dictation transcribes your speech in the language you selected, but it has no translation feature. If you want to speak one language and paste another, you need a tool with translation built into the dictation flow, such as Lipo, which translates into any of its 50+ supported languages.

Do dictation apps work if I have an accent?

Quality varies a lot. Most speech models are trained heavily on standard accents, so regional accents and non-native English are where cheap transcription falls apart. The only reliable way to know is to test with your own voice: dictate a real paragraph with names and natural corrections, and count the edits you need afterward.

Which dictation app supports the most languages?

Raw language counts are misleading, because a language being on the list does not mean the results are usable. Whisper-based tools list around a hundred languages with very uneven accuracy. Lipo supports 50+ languages and treats non-English accuracy, cleanup, and translation as the core product rather than a checkbox. Judge any tool by how it handles your language, not by the length of its list.

Is voice dictation private?

It depends on the app. Fully on-device options like Apple's dictation and local Whisper apps never send audio anywhere. Lipo keeps your history and recordings on your Mac, sends only what is needed for each request to trusted processing partners, and never sells your content or uses it to train AI models. Whatever you choose, read how the app handles recordings before dictating sensitive material.