Dutch speech to text, without the internet

How accurate Dutch speech to text is in Deixis

The test used Google's FLEURS dataset of sentences read aloud, and its Netherlands Dutch split, nl_nl: 80 clips, the 20 shortest plus 60 at random with a fixed seed, scored as words wrong after lower-casing and dropping punctuation, and decoded on the processor of a 12-core desktop PC running Windows. The result was 9.2% words wrong: roughly nine words in a hundred. The evidence page has the method in full.

That is under our bar for offering a language, fewer than one word in ten wrong, but not by much, and we would rather you heard it from us. Dutch is the language where Deixis's figure is highest, level with French. It is also where the change in 1.6 helped most: the multilingual Whisper small model Deixis shipped before 1.6 got 20.5% of the same words wrong, one in five. NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, which Deixis now uses for Dutch, more than halves that.

What the figure does not cover:

• Flemish. The dataset's Dutch is Netherlands Dutch. Flemish was not measured separately, so we make no claim for it.
• Free speech and noise. People reading a sentence aloud stop and restart less than people dictating an email, and nothing here tested a noisy room.
• Your laptop or a Mac. 0.31 seconds is the median decode on one desktop processor. A laptop is slower, and none of these figures were measured on a Mac.

Why Windows has no offline Dutch

Three Microsoft features take speech, and none of them takes Dutch without the internet. All of this is from Microsoft's own support pages, read on 4 November 2026.

Voice typing (Win+H) does Dutch, but only online. Its page lists Dutch (Netherlands) among the Windows 11 languages and says voice typing uses online speech recognition powered by Azure Speech services, with an internet connection required. Your voice goes to Microsoft every time. On the same page, the older Windows 10 dictation list has no Dutch at all.

Voice access has no Dutch. Voice access is Windows 11's offline option: it downloads a language once and recognises speech on the PC. Its set-up page lists English, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Chinese and Japanese. Dutch is not among them.

The old Speech Recognition never had Dutch. Microsoft's Dutch page for it says it is available only in English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese, and that voice access replaced it on Windows 11 22H2 and later in September 2024. People who try it on a Dutch Windows report seeing the message that speech recognition "is not available for the current display language".

Deixis is a way round all three: Dutch, recognised on your own computer, in any app.

Wispr Flow, Dragon and the Mac

Wispr Flow recognises speech and cleans it up in its own cloud. Our facts file on it, checked on 7 October 2026, records no list of the languages it supports, so we do not state one. What its own pages say is that every dictation is transcribed in its cloud and that you need an account, so your Dutch audio leaves your computer each time. Wispr Flow compared with Deixis.

Dragon Professional 16 is the long-standing Dutch choice on Windows, and for people who dictate all day with voice commands and macros it still is. It runs only on Windows; Nuance stopped selling Dragon for Mac in 2018. Nuance publishes no price; Den Draak Spraakherkenning sells Dragon Professional 16 with Dutch and English dictation for €999.00 including 21% VAT (4 November 2026). Dragon compared with Deixis.

On a Mac, Apple Dictation does Dutch on the device once its speech model is downloaded, per Apple's feature-availability page (4 November 2026). If you only ever dictate on a Mac, it is already there and free. Deixis does the same job on Windows and the Mac alike, with one chord on each.

Word's Dictate button lists Dutch (Netherlands) as a preview language, which Microsoft says may have lower accuracy or limited punctuation. Microsoft also says Dictate is only for Microsoft 365 subscribers and needs a reliable internet connection.

What you get in Dutch, and what you do not

What Deixis 1.6 promises in Dutch:

• Push-to-talk dictation in any app. Hold, speak Dutch, release; the text is typed at the cursor, and your clipboard is handed back the way you left it.
• Recognition on your own computer. After a one-time download of about 670 MB, Dutch dictation works with the Wi-Fi off, and once the speech model is on it, the audio of a dictation never leaves the machine, under any setting.
• No account, and no trial clock on dictation.

What is not there yet:

• The polish is tuned for English. Cleanup, the dictionary of your own words, the vocabulary packs (English word lists) and the punctuation Deixis adjusts to the field you type into are all built for English. We do not claim they work in Dutch.
• Unusual names are harder. Parakeet hears a dictionary word only by its sound, so a rare surname or product name comes out right less often than it would with Whisper in English.
• One language at a time. You choose Dutch; Deixis does not detect it, and switching between Dutch and English inside a sentence was not measured.
• Flemish is not measured.
• Windows needs AVX2, a processor from 2013 or later (Intel Haswell, AMD Excavator); the Mac needs macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon. Android follows later.

Free, and where it stops. Dutch dictation is free forever, like everything Deixis runs on your own computer. What can cost money is the part that needs a language model: cleanup by a model rather than rules, translating a selection, and meeting notes. Those are free with your own provider key or a model on your own machine; otherwise Deixis Pro runs them, at $49 a year or $10 a month.

Setting it up

1. Download Deixis for Windows or the Mac and install it.
2. On first run on Windows, Deixis proposes your computer's display language. On a Dutch Windows that is Dutch; otherwise choose it.
3. Let it download the speech model once, about 670 MB.
4. Click into any text field, hold Ctrl+Win (Ctrl+Option on a Mac), say a Dutch sentence, and let go.

From then on it works without the internet. The other languages work the same way.