Is Samsung voice input or Google voice typing better?

Neither engine has a published result that proves it is better on a Galaxy phone, so the honest answer is that it depends on your phone, your language and your text. Samsung voice input and Google Voice Typing are both built-in options. ¹ You choose between them in settings, and the choice affects which speech engine turns your words into text.

Samsung does not say which engine is more accurate, and we found no independent test of the two on Galaxy phones. That leaves you with one reliable method, which is to test both on your own phone.

Samsung publishes no accuracy comparison

Samsung's keyboard pages explain how to pick an engine, but they do not compare results. ² The same Voice input screen also lets you change the voice input language. ³ So the setting you need to change to test the engines is in the same place as the language.

Samsung voice input is available only in Samsung Keyboard. ¹ So if you type in another keyboard, the Samsung engine is not an option there, and the comparison below applies only when Samsung Keyboard is active.

Users say Google is more accurate, but the evidence is anecdotal

Some Galaxy owners post in Samsung Community forums that Google's engine transcribes more accurately for them, and that switching to it fixed errors they saw with Samsung's engine. Other posts describe Samsung's engine working well. These are individual reports, not tests, and we did not reproduce them on our own devices. We also found reports that the Samsung engine handles some plurals and custom words poorly, but these too come from individual posts and vendor blogs.

Read those reports as a reason to test, not as a verdict. Your accent, your vocabulary and your phone's software version all affect the result.

Offline use depends on the language pack, not the brand

Samsung's offline setup lives in the Offline voice input section. Select a language in the Offline voice input section to use it offline. ⁴ To add a language, tap Install offline language pack. ⁵ Samsung's pages do not say which languages have offline packs on each model, so check the list on your phone.

Google's keyboard shows what the trade-off looks like. In 2019, Google moved Gboard voice typing onto the phone with an 80 MB speech recognizer that works offline, first on Pixel phones in American English. ⁶ Before that, Google said its server recognizer used a search graph of almost 2 GB, which could not easily be hosted on a phone. ⁷ Those figures describe Gboard in 2019. We cannot confirm that Google Voice Typing on a Galaxy uses the same recognizer, so treat them as background, not as a rating of the engine on your phone.

Test both engines on your own phone

Use the same paragraph for each engine, so the only thing that changes is the engine. The test takes only a few minutes.

1. Open Settings, go to Samsung Keyboard settings, then Voice input, and select Samsung voice input.
2. Dictate a short paragraph of about 80 words in the language you use most, in a quiet room, with normal punctuation.
3. Count the words you had to correct afterwards, including punctuation and names.
4. Switch to Google Voice Typing and dictate the same paragraph again.
5. Count the corrections the same way, and keep the engine with fewer.
6. Repeat the test after a major software update, because the result can change.

Keep the paragraph and the room the same between the two runs. If you dictate in more than one language, run the test in each one, because an engine can be strong in one language and weaker in another.

Choose by what you dictate

Where to read more

This question is part of our guide to talk to text on Samsung Galaxy, which sits in our overview of dictation on phones and tablets. For the Samsung engine, see the Samsung voice input glossary entry. For the Google side, see Google Voice Typing and Gboard. If the microphone is missing from the keyboard, read our question on why the voice input button is missing on Samsung Keyboard. If dictation fails altogether, see why talk to text is not working on a Samsung. For offline dictation on other phones, read our guide to offline voice typing on phones.