Does dictation work for both Brazilian and European Portuguese?

Yes, dictation supports both variants of Portuguese on the two main desktop systems. The difference is in the offline options and in the evidence on accuracy. Choose the variant you write in before you dictate, and check the on-device list if you need to work without the internet.

Both variants are on the main lists, so you choose one

Apple's Dictation list for the Mac includes both Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese (Portugal) ¹. Windows 11 voice typing lists both as separate languages ². Both platforms treat the variants as separate choices, so the setting you pick decides which spelling and vocabulary the recognizer expects.

Windows 11 voice typing needs an internet connection, a working microphone and the cursor in a text box ³. So on Windows, neither variant works offline.

On a Mac, only Brazilian Portuguese is on the on-device list

The on-device list for the Mac includes Portuguese (Brazil), but not Portuguese (Portugal) ⁴. If you write European Portuguese and need to dictate without a connection, the Mac's built-in list does not offer your variant as an on-device option.

Whisper uses one Portuguese code, and its test figure is not split by variant

The open-source Whisper model has one language code for Portuguese, "pt", and no separate code for each variant ⁵. Its published word error rate for Portuguese on FLEURS, a read-speech benchmark, is 4.3 percent for Portuguese as one language ⁶. That figure does not tell you how the model performs on Brazilian or European speech separately.

For the same reason, a Whisper-based app may treat both variants with one model. Check whether the app offers a variant setting, and if it does not, test it with your own writing before you rely on it.

Research on European Portuguese is thinner than on Brazilian

We did not find a published study that compares the two variants head to head on the same system. The most useful recent source is the CAMÕES benchmark, an open test set for European Portuguese. Its authors say that existing Portuguese speech recognition resources are mostly focused on Brazilian Portuguese, which leaves European Portuguese under-explored ⁷. This does not mean European Portuguese dictation is worse. It means the public evidence on accuracy is thinner for European Portuguese, so the test you run on your own speech carries more weight. The CAMÕES paper is a 2025 preprint that reports results for its own test sets, so its numbers should not be compared directly with other benchmarks.

What to do

1. Pick the variant before you dictate. Set Portuguese (Brazil) or Portuguese (Portugal) in the platform's own list, and check it when you switch apps.
2. Check the on-device list if you need offline work. On a Mac, only Brazilian Portuguese is on it, so European Portuguese will need a connection.
3. Test two paragraphs of your own writing. Dictate a passage with the vocabulary and spelling you use, then count the errors and note which words the recognizer misses.
4. Edit for the variant. Vocabulary and spelling differ between the two variants, so read the text as a reader of your variant would, and correct any words that belong to the other one.

The guide to speech to text in European languages compares the Portuguese lists with those for French, German and Russian. The overview of languages and accents covers other regional variants. For dictation in general, see the entry on dictation and the entry on on-device speech recognition. If you also write in Russian or German, the questions on voice typing in Russian and Swiss German speech recognition cover the regional choices in those languages.