How do you voice type in Bangla and get English text?

Voice type in Bangla first, then translate the Bangla text into English. Most people should do it this way, because each step can be checked on its own. Bangla is also called Bengali, and the tools use both names, so look for either one in the language list. The one-step route, where you speak Bangla and get English straight out, depends on a speech model that can translate. The model we could measure does that poorly for Bangla, so treat its English as a first draft.

For the wider method, see the guide to speech to text with translation. For the other languages in this group, the guide to Hindi voice typing covers the Indian languages side by side.

Dictate in Bangla first, then translate the text

The two-step method works on any device where you can dictate Bangla. Google added voice input for Bengali in August 2017, alongside seven other Indian languages ¹. That announcement is the oldest source here, so confirm that Bengali appears in your own keyboard's voice input languages before you rely on it.

1. Add Bengali to your keyboard languages on Android, or choose it as the dictation language on your computer.
2. Dictate in full sentences, with a short pause at the end of each one.
3. Read the Bangla transcript and correct every recognition error you see.
4. Paste the corrected Bangla into a translator, and read the English output against what you said.

Check the transcript before you translate. A wrong word in Bangla becomes a confident wrong word in English, and the translator does not warn you about it.

Windows voice typing does not offer Bangla

On Windows, the built-in list does not include Bengali. Microsoft's Azure Speech table lists Bengali (India) with the code bn-IN ², but Microsoft's own list of 46 languages and variants for Windows 11 voice typing runs from Bulgarian to Vietnamese and has no Bengali entry ³. A Windows user therefore needs a browser tool or a third-party app for step one. The question on Bangla, Urdu and Arabic voice typing on Windows lists those options and how to test them.

Whisper translates Bangla speech in one step, but its Bangla results are poor

OpenAI's open model Whisper includes Bengali in its language table ⁴, and its translation feature turns speech into English. The limit is direction: OpenAI's translations endpoint supports translation into English only ⁵. If you need Bangla output, this route does not give it to you.

The model is weak on Bangla speech itself. On the Fleurs read-speech benchmark, Whisper large-v2 had a word error rate of 104.1 percent for Bengali ⁶. A rate above 100 percent means the output contains more wrong words than the reference has words, which happens when the model inserts words that were not spoken.

The same model's speech-to-English translation for Bengali scored 13.2 BLEU on the same benchmark ⁷. For comparison, it scored 34.6 BLEU for German ⁸. BLEU measures how closely machine output matches reference translations, and a low score means the English often differs from the reference. The low score is probably partly due to recognition errors made first, the same chain of errors described in the accuracy question.

So use one-step Whisper translation for a rough gist, and do not use it for anything that must be correct.

Google Translate needs you to choose Bangla as the spoken language

Google Translate on a computer does not work out the language you speak. Google says that translation with a microphone on a computer does not automatically detect the language, so you must choose it yourself ⁹. Set the spoken language to Bengali before you speak, and then set English as the output.

We did not confirm in a current Google source that Bengali appears on the speech list of Google Translate. The 2017 announcement is about voice input, so it does not settle whether the translator accepts Bengali speech. Open the app's language list on your own phone or browser and look for Bengali under speech before you plan around it. If the language is not there, use the Gboard route above and paste the text into the translator.

It depends on which device you use and what you are translating

• On Android with Gboard, step one works in Bengali, and the translation is a separate step you do in a translator app or web page.
• On Windows, step one needs a browser or third-party tool, because the built-in list does not include Bengali.
• For a recording rather than live speech, one-step translation with Whisper is possible, but the error rates above make a full human review necessary. For the steps, read how to translate audio and video to English text.
• For a legal, medical or safety notice, use a fluent translator and do not rely on either route alone.

What to do

1. Use the two-step method for most dictation: Bangla voice typing, then translation of the text.
2. Speak one short paragraph in Bangla and read the transcript before you translate it.
3. Translate the corrected text and compare the English with what you said. Check names, numbers and dates twice.
4. Keep a list of the names and terms the recognizer gets wrong, and correct them every time.
5. Test the whole path with two or three minutes of your own speech before you rely on it for real work.

Related answers: how to voice type in Urdu and get English text, how accurate speech to text translation is, and which APIs combine speech to text and translation. For the term, see speech translation. The dictation languages, accents and voice translation overview shows how the language lists compare across tools.