French speech to text that runs on your computer

How accurate French speech to text is in Deixis

The test used Google's FLEURS dataset of sentences read aloud, and its France French split, fr_fr: 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, about 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, with less room than we would like, and French shares the highest figure of the six new languages with Dutch. The change in 1.6 made the difference: the multilingual Whisper small model Deixis shipped before 1.6 got 18.1% of the same words wrong, close to one in five. NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, which now does French in Deixis, halves that.

What the figure does not cover:

• Quebec and Belgian French. The dataset's French is France's. Quebec French, Belgian French and other regional accents were not measured, so we make no claim for them.
• Free speech and noise. Read sentences are easier than thinking aloud, and nothing here tested a noisy room.
• Your laptop or a Mac. 0.44 seconds is the median decode on one desktop processor. A laptop is slower, and none of these figures were measured on a Mac.

French voice typing on Windows

All of this is from Microsoft's own support pages, read on 4 November 2026.

Voice typing (Win+H) does French, online. Its page lists French (France) and French (Canada) and says voice typing uses online speech recognition powered by Azure Speech services, with an internet connection required. No Microsoft page we read says it works offline in French. Your voice goes to Microsoft every time.

Voice access does French on the PC. On Windows 11 22H2 and later, voice access downloads a French language file once (France or Canada) and then recognises speech on the computer itself. It is free, it is offline, and it is built for controlling the whole PC by voice, with dictation as one part. If you want to run Windows by voice, it is worth trying before anything else.

Where Deixis differs is in doing one job: you hold a key, say a French sentence, and it is typed at the cursor in any app, with your clipboard put back afterwards. It also runs on the Mac, we publish how accurate it is and how we measured it, and what leaves your computer is listed byte by byte.

Dragon Professional 16 has a French edition and remains the serious choice for people who dictate all day with its voice commands and macros. It runs only on Windows; Nuance stopped selling Dragon for Mac in 2018. Nuance publishes no price; the French reseller Elindo lists Dragon Professional 16 at €832.50 before VAT, €999.00 with it (4 November 2026). Dragon compared with Deixis.

Wispr Flow, Murmure 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. Its own pages say every dictation is transcribed in its cloud and that you need an account, so your French audio leaves your computer each time. Wispr Flow compared with Deixis.

Murmure deserves a fair mention, because it uses the same model family. It is a free, open-source app that runs a tuned version of Parakeet v3 on your computer, on Windows, Mac and Linux, and by its own pages (4 November 2026) it covers 25 European languages and detects which one you are speaking. If you need Linux, or dictate in several languages and want it to notice which, it is a good fit. What Deixis adds is a published measurement for each language it offers, and one chord that types into any app on Windows and the Mac.

On a Mac, Apple Dictation does French on the device once its speech model is downloaded, for French as spoken in France, Canada, Belgium and Switzerland, per Apple's feature-availability page (4 November 2026). It is already on your Mac and free. Apple Dictation compared with Deixis.

What you get in French, and what you do not

What Deixis 1.6 promises in French:

• Push-to-talk dictation in any app. Hold, speak French, 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, French 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 French.
• 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 French; Deixis does not detect it, and switching between French and English inside a sentence was not measured.
• Quebec and Belgian French are 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. There is no Linux build, and Android follows later.

Free, and where it stops. French 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 French system that is French; 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 French sentence, and let go.

From then on it works offline. The other languages work the same way.