How do you dictate in French?

Dictating in French works the same way as German: add a French language to your dictation settings, then start dictation in a text field and speak. What differs is the error pattern. French hides many endings in speech, and some pairs of words sound identical, so the recognizer has to guess the spelling from context. Choose the variant you write, then test a paragraph with those pairs before you trust the output.

Add French on a Mac or in Windows 11

On a Mac, Dictation is turned on in Keyboard settings and the language is set in the same place ¹. Open Keyboard settings, select Dictation, click Edit next to Languages, and select a French entry ². Apple's main Dictation list includes French (Belgium), French (Canada), French (France) and French (Switzerland) ³. Apple's on-device list also includes French (Switzerland) ⁴, so check that list on your own Mac if you need dictation without a connection.

On Windows 11, select Start, then Settings, then Time & language, then Language & region, and add a French language ⁵. Microsoft's list of languages that support voice typing includes French (Canada) and French (France) as two separate entries ⁶. Press the Windows key and H on a hardware keyboard, with the cursor in a text box, to start ⁷. Voice typing uses online recognition, so the PC must be connected to the internet ⁸.

Canadian and European French differ in vocabulary and spelling, so pick the variant that matches the text you write.

Homophones are where French dictation slips

French dictation is strong on ordinary sentences, but its errors cluster on words that sound the same. A published study of French speech recognition uses the pair et (and) and est (is) as its test case, and it notes that recognizers separate such words mainly with language model weights ⁹. When the sounds match, the recognizer's guess about the surrounding words decides the spelling. A wrong guess gives a real French word with the wrong meaning, and a spell check will not catch it. See the glossary entry on homophones.

The second weak point is agreement. Plural endings on nouns and verb endings after a subject are often silent, so the recognizer has to use context to choose the written form. Read each sentence for plurals and verb forms before you send it.

French also has a published error rate you should know. On the FLEURS read-speech benchmark, Whisper large-v2 had a word error rate of 8.3 percent for French ¹⁰. That is the highest of the six European languages in our guide, and about 1.8 times the German rate on the same test ¹¹. It is a read-speech figure, so treat it as a ranking rather than a promise for your own voice. The word error rate glossary entry explains how the figure is counted.

Punctuation and guillemets need the French names

French uses its own spoken names for marks. On a Mac, point d'interrogation gives a question mark, and guillemet ouvrant gives an opening guillemet («) ¹². In Microsoft Word's dictation, the phrase deux points gives a colon ¹³. Apple's French Mac help says that Dictée, the French name for Dictation, adds some punctuation marks on its own in supported languages ¹⁴, so do not say a mark that the feature already adds. The question on French punctuation commands has the full list.

What to do before you rely on French dictation

1. Choose the variant you write: a French entry on the Mac, or France or Canada on Windows.
2. Dictate a paragraph that includes et and est, plural nouns and past participles.
3. Read the result and count the errors. Note which ones are homophones and which are endings.
4. Correct the pattern once, then dictate a second paragraph on a different topic to check that the fix holds.

For the full comparison of languages, read the guide to speech to text in French, German, Russian and more. The overview of dictation languages, accents and voice translation lists the other languages. For the same steps in German, read the question on dictating in German, and for Russian, read the question on voice typing in Russian.