Hindi Voice Typing and Speech to Text

The quickest way to voice type in Hindi is usually the tool already on your device. Google said in August 2017 that Hindi voice input was already available ¹. Apple's Dictation lists Hindi (India) ². Windows 11 voice typing includes Hindi ³. Google Docs voice typing had Hindi on its language list in 2020 ⁴. None of these is equally good. Hindi recognition is less accurate than English, Hinglish (Hindi with English words mixed in) is harder again, and each tool handles punctuation and offline use differently. This guide sets out what each option supports, what the accuracy research shows, and what to check before you trust the text.

Hindi voice typing comes built in on Android, iPhone, Windows and Google Docs

You do not need a separate app to voice type in Hindi on the common platforms. The choice depends on the device you use most and on whether you need the text to work offline.

The table shows what we could confirm from the vendor pages we read. It does not promise that every app on the device accepts Hindi dictation in the same way.

Gboard is the first option to try for Hindi on Android

On Android, Gboard is the tool to test first. Google said in August 2017 that voice input was already available for Hindi, before it added eight more Indian languages: Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu ⁶. Google also said that speakers of the newly added languages would be able to use their voice to dictate, and in Search through the Google app ⁷.

Gboard can run offline. In February 2025, 9to5Google reported that Gboard for Android features offline voice typing on all devices ⁸. That report does not list languages, so confirm that your Hindi voice pack is installed before you test in a place with no signal. Guiding Tech's guide to fixing voice-to-text on Android says downloading speech recognition languages for Gboard can also improve voice typing where the network signal is weak ⁹, so download the pack while you are on a good connection.

To switch languages, tap the language abbreviation in the voice toolbar. Google's Gboard guidance says you switch languages by tapping the abbreviation at the bottom left, which shows your default language ¹⁰. A 2023 report says you can still switch voice typing languages manually by choosing the matching language keyboard ¹¹. If Hindi does not come out, check that the Hindi keyboard is added and selected.

Spoken punctuation is less reliable. Google's Gboard help lists spoken phrases such as period, comma, question mark, new line and new paragraph ¹², and those phrases are in English. Google also says punctuation might not be available in every language that Gboard voice typing supports ¹³. Plan to type Hindi punctuation yourself, as described below.

On an iPhone, Hindi dictation is listed but not in the on-device list

Apple's iOS and iPadOS feature availability page lists Hindi (India) in its general Dictation section ². The same page has a separate section for On-Device and Modeless Dictation, and Hindi is not in that section ². Do not assume Hindi dictation works without a connection on iPhone. Test it in airplane mode before a trip, and check the Keyboard settings, which show whether dictation runs on the device or on Apple's servers ¹⁴.

On a computer, Windows, Google Docs and browser tools differ in Hindi support

Windows 11 voice typing includes Hindi in its list of supported languages ³. Microsoft's Azure Speech locale table lists Bengali (India) and Urdu (India) for speech to text ¹⁵, which matters if you build software on the Azure service rather than use Windows voice typing directly.

Google Docs voice typing worked only in Chrome in the December 2020 archived copy of Google's help page ⁵. Hindi was on its language list ⁴. We could not read Google's current help page, because it returned a verification page to our tools, so check the current list in Google Docs before you rely on it.

Mac dictation has its own language list. We could not confirm a clear Hindi entry in Apple's Mac list from a page we could read. Check the Dictation language list on your own Mac before you plan around Hindi. Our guide to Mac dictation languages explains how to change the language.

Browser and third-party tools vary. Our free online dictation works in the browser. Yap, which we make, runs dictation on the device on Mac and Windows, and it is one option among several. Whichever tool you pick, test it with a paragraph you would really dictate.

Hindi is recognized less accurately than English, and the gap is measurable

The clearest comparison comes from the FLEURS benchmark, a parallel speech dataset in 102 languages ¹⁶. On FLEURS, Whisper large-v2 had a word error rate of 4.2 percent for English and 21.5 percent for Hindi ^{17 18}. That makes its Hindi error rate about 5.1 times its English rate ¹⁹.

Word error rate is the share of words a recognizer gets wrong, so 21.5 percent ¹⁸ means about one word in five is wrong on that test. The chart compares Hindi with other languages measured with the same model on the same benchmark.

The chart uses the Spanish, English, Tamil, Hindi, Urdu and Telugu results from the same paper ^{20 21 22}. Telugu is far worse, at 99.0 percent ²³, about 4.6 times the Hindi rate ²⁴. Results depend on the model. The next chart uses a 2025 table from the Voxtral paper, which tested three systems on the same Hindi FLEURS test.

In that table, Whisper large-v3 had 28.87 percent in Hindi ²⁵, GPT-4o mini Transcribe had 12.36 percent ²⁶, and Gemini 2.5 Flash had 6.76 percent ²⁷. Whisper's error rate was about 4.3 times Gemini's in that table ²⁸. The same Whisper large-v3 reached 46.75 percent on the Mozilla Common Voice Hindi test, which uses a different, crowd-recorded set of recordings ²⁹. A single figure does not settle how your own audio will score, so compare results on the test that matches your speech.

Accent matters as well. The LAHAJA benchmark has 12.5 hours of Hindi audio from 132 speakers across 83 districts of India ³⁰. Its authors evaluated existing open-source and commercial models and found their performance poor ³¹. Performance declined for speakers from North-East and South India, especially with named entities and specialized terminology ³². If you say client names, place names or technical terms, expect more errors there. Our guide on speech recognition and accents covers how to adjust for this.

How errors are counted also changes the figure. Indian-language spelling varies, and code-mixed English words are often written more than one way. A 2026 study proposed an orthographic error rate that accepts permissible spelling variants, and found that scoring them as correct lowers error rates for Indian-language speech recognition by an average of 6.3 points ³³. A percentage from a standard benchmark is therefore a guide, not a verdict. Read a sample of your own dictation to judge it.

Hinglish is harder because the language changes inside a sentence

Hinglish is Hindi speech with English words mixed in, such as "meeting kal hai" or "file upload kar do". A 2025 preprint on code-switching recognition says that spontaneous switching within a sentence causes language confusion, and that accent bias blurs the boundaries between languages ³⁴. The HiACC authors cite recent evaluations showing a 30 to 50 percent relative increase in word error rate on code-switched speech compared with monolingual input ³⁵.

The data is a bottleneck. A 2018 Hindi-English study said very limited code-switched speech resources were available, which is why its authors built a Hindi-English speech database ³⁶. A 2025 review also found that a small subset of languages receives most of the attention, with a large disparity in the languages covered by datasets ³⁷.

In practice, keep one language per sentence where you can, and set the language to match the passage. Our guide on multilingual dictation explains how mixed-language input behaves in the main tools. For the term itself, see code-switching.

Hindi sentences end with the daṇḍa, so check which mark your app writes

Hindi sentences end with the daṇḍa, the vertical stroke that works as a full stop in Hindi and Nepali. The daṇḍa marks the end of a sentence or line ³⁸. Unicode encodes it as U+0964, named DEVANAGARI DANDA ³⁹.

This matters because an app may write a Western full stop (.) where you wanted the daṇḍa (।). Check the first paragraph of a test. If the app writes the Western mark, correct it with find and replace after you dictate.

Spoken punctuation in Hindi is not consistent across tools. Gboard's documented punctuation phrases are in English ¹², and Google says punctuation phrases might not be available in every language ¹³. Google Docs gave the same caveat in 2020 ⁴⁰. Our guide to dictation punctuation in other languages explains how spoken punctuation works across languages, and the glossary entry on spoken punctuation defines the term.

Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati and Urdu are supported unevenly

The other Indian languages follow the same pattern, though the detail varies. Google's 2017 announcement added eight Indian languages, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu, to its voice input ⁶. Windows 11's list includes Marathi ³. Microsoft's Azure Speech table includes Bengali (India) and Urdu (India) ¹⁵.

Error rates on the same FLEURS benchmark show how wide the spread is. With the same model, Tamil reached 17.5 percent ²¹, Urdu 22.6 percent ²² and Telugu 99.0 percent ²³. Whisper's own documentation says performance varies widely by language and publishes a per-language breakdown ⁴¹. Our guide to Whisper languages and accuracy explains how the figures were measured, and the question on Urdu voice typing covers Urdu.

A 2026 preprint analyzes open-source speech recognition models on Hindi, Bengali, Kannada, Telugu and Marathi together, and looks at why recognition varies, such as speaking rate, telephone codecs and background noise ⁴². Read it as a reason to test your own audio. It is a preprint, so its results may change in peer review.

Developers can use Indian-language models from Google, Microsoft, AI4Bharat and Bhashini

If you build an app, you have several options. Google Cloud Speech-to-Text lists Hindi (India), code hi-IN, for its chirp_2 model ⁴³. Microsoft's Azure Speech table includes Bengali (India) and Urdu (India) locales ¹⁵, so check the locale code for each language you need.

AI4Bharat, an Indian research group, published the IndicVoices dataset: 7,348 hours of read, extempore and conversational speech from 16,237 speakers across 22 languages ⁴⁴. The authors built IndicASR from it, which they describe as the first ASR model to support all 22 languages in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution ⁴⁵. AI4Bharat's Hindi model is listed on AIKosh, the Indian government's AI model portal. The listing describes a Conformer-Large model with 120 million parameters ⁴⁶ under the MIT license ⁴⁷. It has no accuracy figure, so test it before you rely on it.

Bhashini is a government language platform. Its 2025 Maha Kumbh material says its translation supported a chatbot in 11 languages, including Hindi ⁴⁸. We could not read Bhashini's current developer documentation, so check its portal before you design around it. The question on speech to text APIs for Indian languages compares the options in more detail.

Pick a tool by checking your language, your device and your own speech

Start with the device you already have: Gboard on Android, Apple Dictation on iPhone, Windows voice typing on a Windows PC, or Google Docs in Chrome. Each supports Hindi in some form, and each handles punctuation and offline use differently. Then test with a real paragraph that includes your names and terms, and read the result before you send it.

Expect Hinglish to need the most correction. Names and technical terms need the closest reading, because in the LAHAJA study performance declined for some regional accents, especially on content heavy in named entities and specialized terminology ³². If you dictate Hindi on a computer, the question on Hindi voice typing on a computer walks through the options. The question on voice typing from Hindi to English explains why translation is a second step with its own errors.

Your typing speed in Hindi is a separate question. The CBSE typing test sets its Hindi criterion at 30 words per minute, against 35 for English ^{49 50}. The Jharkhand High Court's 2013 advertisement for Hindi stenographers required 70 words per minute in shorthand and 35 words per minute in typing ⁵¹. Exam criteria are not the same as the speed you need for a dictated draft, and the question on Hindi typing speed explains the difference. For the wider picture, see our typing speed guide.

For more on other languages and how to switch between them, see our dictation languages guide and the guide to changing the dictation language. To compare apps, see how to choose a dictation app.

The languages overview lists every guide on speech and typing across languages.