How accurate is speech recognition in Finnish?

Finnish is one of the better-served smaller languages: with the right engine only about 1 word in 13 is wrong on read speech. In our October 2026 benchmark on a Mac with an M2 Pro, Whisper large-v3-turbo had a word error rate of 7.73 percent ¹ and Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 had 10.11 percent ², on 100 Finnish recordings from the FLEURS test set. We have no Apple SpeechTranscriber result for Finnish.

Whisper beats Parakeet in Finnish, the reverse of its neighbors

Finnish is a language where Whisper is the more accurate engine, by a clear margin of a couple of points. In Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian Parakeet wins, so the right engine depends on the language. Parakeet is the faster of the two here: about 19 times faster than real time ³, against about 14 times for Whisper ⁴. Both are fast enough for dictation, so accuracy is the better reason to choose. The speed dataset covers every language.

Our measurement of the engines in Finnish

Lower is better in this table.

The transcripts behind each row are on the on-device benchmark page.

Published scores point the same way

OpenAI's paper gives 9.7 percent for the older Whisper large-v2 on FLEURS Finnish ⁵, in line with our Whisper result. NVIDIA reports 13.21 percent for Parakeet on the same test ⁶, higher than our 10.11 percent. Whisper ahead of Parakeet therefore shows up in both our numbers and the published ones.

All published rows are on the published accuracy page.

Finnish ranks eleventh of 25 languages

Taking the best engine in each language, Finnish is eleventh of the 25 languages in the benchmark. It sits just behind Polish (7.70 percent ⁷), which scores almost the same, and ahead of Swedish (9.95 percent ⁸). Estonian, a close relative, is much worse at 14.17 percent ⁹. Finnish spelling follows pronunciation closely, which helps, though the benchmark does not test that reason.

Formatting costs about two points

Counting punctuation and capital letters as a reader sees them, Whisper's text differed from the written sentences by 9.88 errors per 100 tokens ¹⁰, and Parakeet's by 12.10 ¹¹. Commas and capitals are where the extra errors come from, so expect to fix punctuation as well as words.

What to expect when you dictate in Finnish

Expect to correct about 1 word in 13 with Whisper in a quiet room, which is good enough to dictate most of a draft and edit lightly. Parakeet leaves closer to 1 word in 10. Finnish builds long words from many endings, so names and compound words are the likely trouble spots, and a wrong ending counts as a whole wrong word. Add punctuation by hand or by voice command, and proofread. We found no published fact that confirms Finnish in a built-in Mac or Windows dictation list, so check your system's language list, and read our overview of dictation languages.

What these numbers do not show

The recordings are people reading prepared sentences in a quiet room, scored on one Mac with 100 recordings. Spontaneous speech, dialects, noise and specialist vocabulary are not in the test, and we did not measure Apple's model or any cloud service ourselves. Real dictation will usually score worse than read speech. For the measure itself, see the guide on how accurate speech recognition is.

Our guide to European languages in speech to text helps you choose an engine, and the languages overview covers other languages. For comparison, read the same question for Estonian, Swedish and Polish.