Should you set dictation to US or UK English?

Set the English variant that sounds closest to your own speech. If your accent is British, choose English (United Kingdom). If it is American, choose English (United States). If it is neither, or you are unsure, choose the nearer one and test the other on the same passage. The choice is about how well the app hears you. Spelling is a separate question, covered below.

Recognition follows the speech a system learned from

Recognition accuracy follows the speech a system learned from. A 2021 test of a large English model, trained on 44.5K hours of English speech, found an accuracy bias that favored the accents most common in its training data ¹. Speakers whose accents are underrepresented in training get more errors, whatever their country on paper.

The closest direct comparison we found is a 2024 study of OpenAI's Whisper. The authors reported better performance on North American English accents than on British and Irish ones ². That result has three limits. Whisper is an open model, not the engine inside Apple's or Microsoft's dictation. We read only the preprint abstract, which gives the direction of the result but not the size of the gap. And "British" and "Irish" cover many speakers, so one average is not a forecast for your voice.

Your device's list decides which variants you can pick

Both US and UK English are on the main dictation lists of the systems we checked, so the choice is usually between two options you can actually set.

If you use the advanced Dictation model on a Mac, both the US and UK settings are on its list, so choosing one does not cost you that model. Lists change between systems and versions, so check the list on your own device.

Some dictation commands work only in U.S. English

Accuracy is not the only thing the setting controls. On iPhone, the Dictation commands that edit text are available in U.S. English ⁶. If you rely on voice commands to select, delete or correct text, the UK setting may not give you them. Test the exact commands you use in the variant you plan to choose, and do not assume a command works in every English variant.

Spelling is a separate choice, so check it in your own app

We found no vendor page that says the dictation setting changes the spelling of the words it outputs. The question is still open for your device. GoTranscript, a transcription service, advises choosing American or British spelling and keeping it uniform across a transcript ⁷. Set the spelling you need in the app where you write, using that app's own language or proofing setting, and do not rely on the dictation variant to do it for you.

How to decide with one test

1. On a Mac, go to Dictation, click Edit next to Languages, and select the variant you want to test ⁸.
2. Choose a passage of about 200 words that you would normally dictate. Read it aloud in the first variant at your normal pace, with the microphone you use every day.
3. Repeat with the same passage in the second variant.
4. Count the words that come out wrong in each run, including substitutions, missing words and extra words. Divide by 200 to get the word error rate for each variant.
5. Add two spelling-sensitive words, such as "colour" and "center", and one command you use every day. Note what each variant does with them.
6. Keep the variant with fewer errors. If the scores are close, keep the one that gives you the commands and spelling you need.

Run the test again after a major system update, because the lists and the models change over time. If you switch between the two variants, read the question on dictating in more than one language on a Mac before you choose a setup.

For the wider picture, see our guide to accents and speech recognition, the guide to changing the dictation language on any device and our overview of dictation languages. If the problem is your accent rather than the variant, read why dictation does not understand your accent and whether you can train dictation to your accent.