Which speech recognition apps work for atypical speech?

The built-in options we could verify are Apple's features. Apple's Listen for Atypical Speech is designed for speech affected by an acquired or progressive condition ¹. Google's Project Relate is the Android option, but we could not confirm that it is available to you today. In this review we found no published test of any app on stuttered speech, so no app here has a verified result for stuttering.

Apple's Listen for Atypical Speech is the built-in choice on Apple devices

Apple says the feature uses on-device machine learning to recognize your speech patterns, and that it is designed for people with acquired or progressive conditions that affect speech, such as cerebral palsy, ALS or stroke ¹. Stuttering is not among the examples.

On a Mac, the option works only in U.S. English ². To reach it, choose Apple menu > System Settings, click Accessibility in the sidebar, then click Siri on the right. You may need to scroll down to find the option ³. Menu names can differ between macOS releases, so check them on yours. Then turn on Listen for atypical speech, and check your Siri language first, because the option is only available in U.S. English.

We could not confirm from Apple's pages whether this option appears on iPhone or iPad, so check your device's settings before you rely on it.

Vocal Shortcuts suits more severe speech, for a few commands

Apple's Mac guide suggests a different feature for moderate to severe speech: Vocal Shortcuts. It says that if you have moderate to severe atypical speech, you can teach your Mac to perform an action when you speak a word or another sound of your choosing ⁴.

Vocal Shortcuts suits a small set of commands, not free dictation. Use it to open an app or run a task, not to write an email. We found no accuracy figure for it, so test each sound you plan to use.

Project Relate was an Android app in testing, and its status is unclear

Google opened Project Relate for testing in 2021 and invited English-speaking testers in five countries: Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the United States ⁵. The app was built on research that used more than a million speech samples from participants ⁶.

A January 2023 report said the app was seeing wider Play Store availability ⁷. That is the most recent dated record we found. We could not confirm its availability in 2026, which countries it covers, or whether it runs on iOS. If you want to use it, check Google's current Android pages or the Play Store listing in your region before you plan around it.

The research tests do not rank the apps

We found no test of the apps above on stuttered speech. The stuttering study measured technical changes to a consumer recognizer, with 91 people who stutter ⁸. The dysarthria studies here tested recognizers rather than the apps on your phone, so they do not show how a particular app performs in daily use. In a 2026 test of commercial systems, every system exceeded 51 percent word error on severe dysarthric speech, with default settings ⁹. That result describes the systems tested in that study, not any app named here.

So we do not rank these apps. What the evidence supports is narrower: the built-in Apple options are designed for atypical speech, and their results on the speakers they were built for are not measured in public studies we could check.

Check four things before you depend on an app

1. The language and region. The Mac option is U.S. English only, and the Play Store availability of Project Relate depends on your country.
2. Where your speech is processed. Apple's Listen for Atypical Speech uses on-device machine learning ¹. For any other app, check whether it sends recordings to a server. Our guide on whether voice to text is safe explains how to check.
3. Your own phrases. Test with the words and commands you use every day, not the demo phrases.
4. A backup. Keep a keyboard, a switch or another input for the words the app still misses.

Related reading

For the research behind these options, read our guide to speech recognition for stuttering and dysarthria, and see the overview of accessibility and health. If you stutter, the question on whether speech recognition works if you stutter covers the error patterns in more detail. If your speech is affected by dysarthria, see whether voice recognition can understand dysarthric speech. Our glossary defines dysarthria and word error rate, the measure used in every study above.