How accurate is speech recognition in Swedish?

Swedish lands in the middle of the 25 languages we tested: about 1 word in 10 is wrong with the better engine 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 9.95 percent ¹ and Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 had 12.03 percent ², on 100 Swedish recordings from the FLEURS test set. We have no Apple SpeechTranscriber result for Swedish.

Whisper is a little more accurate, Parakeet is faster

Whisper has the lower error rate in Swedish by about two points, a modest gap with only 100 recordings. Parakeet transcribed the recordings about 18 times faster than real time ³, and Whisper about 12 times 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 Swedish

Lower is better in this table.

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

Published scores are lower for Whisper and higher for Parakeet

OpenAI's paper gives 8.5 percent for the older Whisper large-v2 on FLEURS Swedish ⁵, a little better than our turbo result. NVIDIA reports 15.08 percent for Parakeet on the same test ⁶, higher than our 12.03 percent. On CoVoST 2 Swedish, built from volunteer recordings, Parakeet had 20.16 percent ⁷. The exact figure depends on the recordings, but Whisper ahead of Parakeet holds in both sets.

All published rows are on the published accuracy page.

Swedish ranks thirteenth of 25 languages

Taking the best engine in each language, Swedish is thirteenth of the 25 languages in the benchmark. Finnish is ahead at 7.73 percent ⁸, and Danish, its closest neighbor, is clearly behind at 14.57 percent ⁹. Spanish (2.53 percent ¹⁰) shows how far the best languages are ahead. Swedish is accurate enough to be useful, but not at the level of the largest languages.

Formatting is where Swedish loses the most

Counting punctuation and capital letters as a reader sees them, Whisper's text differed from the written sentences by 12.94 errors per 100 tokens ¹¹, and Parakeet's by 14.74 ¹². Both engines lose about 3 points once commas and capitals count, more than in most languages here, so expect to tidy punctuation.

What to expect when you dictate in Swedish

Expect to correct about 1 word in 10 with Whisper and about 1 in 8 with Parakeet in a quiet room. Dictation works well for a first draft that you then proofread. Swedish compound words and names are the likely trouble spots, and a split or joined compound counts as a wrong word. Choose Whisper if accuracy is your priority. We found no published fact that confirms Swedish 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 Finnish, Danish and Dutch.