How accurate is speech recognition in Dutch?

Dutch is one of the easier languages in our benchmark. On 100 read FLEURS sentences, Parakeet TDT v3 had a word error rate of 6.32 percent ¹ and Whisper large-v3-turbo had 6.59 percent ². About one word in sixteen is wrong, and the two engines are within 0.3 points of each other.

Because the engines tie on accuracy, speed decides: Parakeet transcribed the Dutch recordings 19 times faster than real time ³, Whisper 12 times faster than real time ⁴. Apple SpeechTranscriber has no row here: in our benchmark it ran only on English, German, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, so for Dutch the choice is between two engines.

The two on-device engines are tied on Dutch

Counting punctuation and capital letters as a reader sees them, Parakeet's formatted error rate was 8.42 percent ⁵ and Whisper's was 8.99 percent ⁶. Both add about two errors per 100 tokens to the word figure, so a dictated Dutch paragraph needs a light edit for commas and capitals as well as for words.

Cloud engines are only a little better on Dutch

Published results let us compare with services that cannot run on the device. In the Voxtral paper's FLEURS Dutch table, ElevenLabs Scribe had 4.63 percent ⁷, and Whisper large-v3 had 5.87 percent ⁸. Gemini 2.5 Flash scored 6.20 percent ⁹. The best cloud figure is about two points lower than our on-device engines, and the others are close to them, a difference you may notice in a long document but not in a short note.

NVIDIA's own figure for Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 on FLEURS Dutch is 7.48 percent ¹⁰, and the Whisper paper gives 6.7 percent ¹¹ for Whisper large-v2. All of these sit in the same band as ours.

Showing 8 of 27 rows. See every row in the dataset.

Dutch ranks in the better half of the 25 languages

Dutch is behind the Romance languages: Italian reached 2.52 percent ¹⁹ and Spanish 2.53 percent ²⁰. It is well ahead of Danish (14.57 percent ²¹ with Whisper) and Czech (10.44 percent ²² with Parakeet). Among Germanic languages in the benchmark it sits between German (4.84 percent ²³ with Parakeet) and Danish.

What to expect when you dictate in Dutch

Expect clean text for everyday sentences and a few corrections per paragraph, mostly for names, compounds and numbers. Dutch is also on Apple's list: Apple lists Dutch (Netherlands) and Dutch (Belgium) among the languages of Mac Dictation ²⁴, so the built-in tool is a reasonable first try. Apple's newer SpeechTranscriber was not part of the Dutch comparison, because it did not run Dutch in our benchmark.

On the engine choice, Parakeet gives the same accuracy as Whisper on Dutch at a higher speed. Yap, which we make, uses Parakeet, so on Dutch the choice costs you nothing in accuracy.

How to read these numbers for Dutch

A word error rate counts every substituted, deleted or inserted word against the written sentence, so a wrong spelling of a compound word costs a full word even when it sounds right. Dutch has many long compounds and loanwords, and that is where most remaining errors hide. With the on-device engines at this level, the choice between them should rest on speed and on how the app handles punctuation and capitals, not on a small difference in word accuracy. If you work in both Dutch and English, remember that English reached 3.92 percent ²⁵ with Whisper in the same test.

What the data does not show

The recordings are read sentences from Wikipedia, spoken in a quiet room, and every engine heard the same 100 of them on one Mac in one run. Real dictation has hesitations, names, numbers and background noise, and none of that is in this benchmark. Numbers and spelling variants are not normalized, so "25" against "twenty-five" counts as an error for every engine alike. Treat the gaps of a point or two between engines as small, and the gaps of five points or more as real.

Where to read more

• All languages in one place: dictation languages, accents and translation and the guide to speech to text in European languages.
• The full rows and every transcript: the on-device ASR benchmark, the published word error rates and the speed data.
• Sibling pages: Danish, Polish, Czech.