How do you voice type in Korean?

To voice type in Korean on a Mac, add Korean (Korea) to Dictation and switch to it before you speak. On Windows 11, press Windows key and H in a text box with Korean set as the voice typing language, but expect the feature to need an internet connection. The slips to watch for are word spacing and borrowed words, so read the output before you send it.

On a Mac, Korean is on the on-device list and the punctuation list

Apple's feature availability page lists Korean (Korea) under On-Device and Modeless Dictation on the Mac, as a separate list from general Dictation ¹. It also lists Korean for Auto-Punctuation, which inserts commas and full stops as you speak ².

Add Korean the same way you would add any dictation language. Go to Dictation, click Edit next to Languages, then select a language and region. Our guide to dictating in Chinese on a Mac walks through the same settings. Apple's lists change between macOS releases, so check the on-device status on your own Mac before you rely on offline dictation.

On Windows 11, Korean voice typing needs the internet

Microsoft's list of languages that support voice typing in Windows 11 includes Korean ³. Voice typing needs an internet connection, a working microphone and the cursor in a text box ⁴.

To start it, press Windows key + H on a hardware keyboard ⁵. If you write Korean on a Windows PC without a connection, the built-in option will not work, and you will need an offline app instead.

Accuracy: the open Korean benchmark shows a 10.31 percent character error rate

The KoSpeech toolkit, an open-source Korean recognizer, reached a character error rate of 10.31 percent on the KsponSpeech corpus of spontaneous Korean dialogue, using the acoustic model alone ⁶. That is a 2020 baseline with no language model, so current systems are probably better. The sources we opened do not include a newer open figure for Korean, so treat 10.31 percent as a reference point, not a forecast for your own speech.

Korean is scored differently from Japanese and Chinese. The Whisper paper scores Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Lao and Burmese by character, and Korean is not on that list ⁷. So the paper measures Korean by word error rate, and a spacing choice can count as an error in that measure. When you compare two Korean numbers, check which metric each one uses.

Spacing and borrowed words are the slips to watch for

Korean writes spaces between words, but the rules leave room for choice. The FLEURS benchmark paper notes that Japanese and Korean transcripts may or may not contain spaces, depending on the transcriber ⁸. A dictation engine chooses its own spacing, so the text can be correct in its letters but spaced differently from the style you want.

Many modern Korean words are borrowed from English and written in hangul. A recognizer may choose a spelling you did not expect, or split a borrowed term into two words. Read names, brands and technical terms before you send the text, because those are the words to check first.

What to do

1. Dictate a short passage of your own writing, about 200 characters, and read the result against what you meant.
2. Check the spacing and the borrowed words. Fix them once, and note which terms come out wrong, so you know what to watch.
3. Check the connection requirement first. On Windows, voice typing needs a connection. On a Mac, confirm that Korean is on the on-device list for your macOS release before you rely on offline dictation.
4. Repeat the test with any new app or setting before you rely on it for long documents.

For a wider view of Asian languages in dictation, see the guide to Japanese, Chinese and Korean speech to text in the Languages section.

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