Dictation With an Accent, or in Two Languages
Dictation with an accent brings its own kind of frustration. You speak clearly, in a language you use all day at work, and the transcript reads as if someone was half-listening from the next room. Then you drop a Spanish phrase into an English email, or say a colleague's name from Hanoi, and the whole sentence falls apart.
The same four complaints turn up across forums and support threads. The engine makes you pick one language per session. Switching mid-sentence breaks it. Non-native accents get noticeably worse accuracy. And names from another language come out as ordinary words that happen to sound similar. Some of that you can fix today with settings and habits; some of it is a limit of the technology that no setting will remove. Knowing which is which saves a lot of wasted fiddling.
It's the training data, not your pronunciation
Dictation is less accurate for some accents because speech recognizers learn from training data, and accents that are thinly represented in that data produce more errors however clearly the speaker talks. The engine isn't judging your English. It's matching your sounds against the voices it learned from, and yours may simply be rarer in that collection.
There's good evidence for the mechanism. When OpenAI's researchers analysed Whisper in their 2022 paper, the amount of training audio available for a language strongly predicted how well the model recognised it; languages with little data did markedly worse. The same logic plausibly holds for accents within a language, and the Stanford team behind a widely cited 2020 study of racial disparities in commercial speech recognition concluded that people with regional and non-native accents could face similar problems.
That has a practical consequence. Trying to flatten your accent rarely helps, and slow, over-careful syllables can make things worse, because they make your speech less like anything the model has heard. Talk at your normal pace, in complete phrases, so the language side of the model has surrounding words to lean on when a single sound is ambiguous.
Choose the closest regional variant, then test it
The setting most worth checking for accented dictation is the language variant: choose the regional version of the language closest to how you actually speak, rather than the default for your country or device. The options are wider than most people realise. Windows 11 voice typing offers English for Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Apple lists fifteen English variants for iPhone dictation, including India, Malaysia, the Philippines and the UAE. Google Docs voice typing has thirteen, among them Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania. And Microsoft labels some of Word's Dictate languages as previews, warning that accuracy and punctuation support can lag, which is worth knowing before you blame yourself.
There's no setting for a French, Mandarin or Arabic accent in English, though. If English is your second language, pick between the variants you learned or hear most, US and UK being the usual pair, and let results decide rather than loyalty.
The two-variant test: write a 60-word paragraph that includes your five hardest words, such as a colleague's name, your company, a street and a number. Dictate it under one regional setting, then under another, in the same room with the same microphone. Keep whichever needs fewer corrections. Ten minutes, once, and you'll stop guessing.
Two languages: why most engines make you choose
Most dictation engines work in one language at a time, so bilingual users have to tell the system which language is coming before they speak. Here's how each major platform handles it, according to its own documentation:
| Platform | How it picks the language | How you switch |
|---|---|---|
| Mac Dictation | Languages you add under Keyboard, then Dictation, in System Settings | Click the language shown beside the cursor while dictating, or press the Globe key |
| iPhone and iPad | Follows the active keyboard; Apple says dictation works in the language of whichever keyboard you use | Add a keyboard per language, then switch keyboards before speaking |
| Windows 11 voice typing | Follows your current input language | Windows key + Spacebar, or the taskbar language switcher |
| Word: Microsoft 365 Dictate | The Spoken Language drop-down in Dictate's settings | Change it in settings between passages |
| Gboard on most Android phones | Follows the keyboard language | Switch keyboard language (hold the space bar or tap the globe) |
| Gboard on Pixel 6 and later | Automatic detection across English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, on by default | Nothing, within those six; the toggle is Auto-switch language |
Sources: Apple, Dictate messages and documents on Mac and Dictate text on iPhone; Microsoft, voice typing and Dictate in Word; Google, advanced voice typing. Checked September 2026.
Google Docs voice typing supports more than 100 languages and accents, but Google's help page documents no automatic detection; our guide to Google Docs voice typing shows where the setting lives.
Notice what's missing from every row: mixing languages inside one sentence. Linguists call it code-switching, and it's how many bilingual people naturally talk. None of the vendor documentation we checked promises it. Even Pixel's detection is described in terms of recognising which language you're speaking, not blending two in one breath. Until someone does promise it, and you've tested it yourself, plan your dictation around whole sentences in one language.
Names from another language have to be taught
Names from another language get mangled because the recognizer hears them through the sounds and vocabulary of whichever language it's set to, then substitutes the nearest familiar word. Set to English, a Vietnamese surname like Nguyen or a Spanish name like Joaquín can easily come out as everyday English words, and the engine will make the same mistake confidently every time.
Three fixes work, in rough order of effort:
- A personal dictionary. Dedicated dictation apps let you store names exactly as they should appear, diacritics included. In the Laxis Voice Keyboard it's called the Personal Dictionary, and it takes names, acronyms and technical terms.
- Spelling by voice. iPhone Dictation lets you say a name and then spell it out; Pixel 8 and later accept commands like “spell Joaquin as J-O-A-Q-U-I-N” in US English.
- Correcting in place. On a Pixel, tap the misheard word and pick or say the right one; Google says advanced voice typing improves from your corrections. On a Mac, words Dictation was unsure about are underlined in blue, with alternatives a click away.
A routine that works for bilingual dictation
The routine that works best for bilingual dictation is to choose the language before each message, keep every burst of speech in one language, and fix mixed-language words in a single editing pass afterwards. In practice:
- Set up both languages once. Add both keyboards on iPhone and Android, both dictation languages on the Mac, both input languages on Windows.
- One message, one language. Glance at the language indicator before you start talking. It takes a second and prevents most of the gibberish.
- Type the borrowed phrase. If an English email needs one French expression, dictate around it and type it, rather than hoping the engine switches mid-flow.
- Keep your name list bilingual. Put colleagues, clients and places from both languages in your dictionary, spelled the way they should appear.
- Draft in your stronger language when it matters. For a long or careful message, dictate in the language you think in, then translate and read the result before sending.
That last step is where an AI dictation tool can save time. Laxis Voice Keyboard works in 100+ languages across Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android, and on Premium its Translate feature rewrites the text you've selected into another language where you typed it. Treat the result as a draft, since machine translation still stumbles on idioms. Be clear on the trade-offs, too: Laxis processes speech in the cloud, and on the free Basic plan, dictation and meeting recordings share one pool of 300 minutes a month. How it handles your particular language pair is best judged in the 14-day Premium trial, which needs no credit card.
Before a bilingual week: spend five minutes adding the ten names you'll say most, in both languages, to whatever dictionary your tool offers. It's the fix that pays back fastest, because names are the words that most often come out wrong and matter most when they do.
Dictation isn't the meeting problem
Dictating in a second language and following a meeting in one are different problems: dictation is about software understanding you, while a meeting is about you understanding other people, often at speed. If the harder part of your week is keeping up on calls, the fixes are different, from agendas sent early to shared glossaries, and we cover them in our guide to running meetings across languages.
And if your dictation trouble isn't only about accents, our troubleshooting guide to why voice to text gets things wrong works through microphones, noise and the rest, while the roundup of dictation tools helps if you're choosing one.
Frequently asked questions
Does voice to text work with an accent?
Yes, voice to text works with most accents, but accuracy is often lower for accents that are less represented in the engine's training data. Choosing the regional language variant closest to your speech, keeping the microphone close and talking at your normal pace narrows the gap. Adding names and technical terms to a custom dictionary fixes many of the remaining errors.
Can you dictate in two languages at the same time?
Mostly not within one sentence. Built-in dictation on Mac, iPhone, Windows and Word works in one selected language at a time, and you switch by hand between messages. Pixel 6 and later can detect which of six supported languages you are speaking, but none of the vendor documentation we checked promises reliable switching inside a single sentence.
How do I switch the dictation language on iPhone?
On iPhone, dictation follows the keyboard language, so add a keyboard for each language in Settings, then General, then Keyboard, then Keyboards, and switch keyboards before you start speaking. Apple notes that when you use a keyboard for another language, Dictation works in that language too. Check the active keyboard before each message to avoid gibberish.
Which English should I choose for dictation if English is my second language?
Choose the regional variant closest to the English you actually speak, then test it. There is no setting for a French or Mandarin accent, so pick between options such as US, UK, Indian or Australian English based on what you learned or hear most. Dictate the same paragraph under two variants and keep the one needing fewer corrections.
How do I stop dictation misspelling names from another language?
Add the names to a custom dictionary if your dictation tool has one, spelled exactly as they should appear, accents included. Built-in dictation usually lacks an editable dictionary, so spell the name letter by letter instead: iPhone Dictation supports this, and Pixel 8 or later accepts 'spell' commands in US English. Correcting words on a Pixel also teaches its voice typing.
Is speech recognition biased against accents?
Speech recognition shows measurable accuracy gaps between groups of speakers, which researchers link to unbalanced training data. A 2020 Stanford study in PNAS found five major systems made roughly twice as many errors for Black speakers as for white speakers, and its authors warned regional and non-native accents could see similar problems. Systems have improved since, but the gaps are not shown to be closed.
