German speech to text that stays on your computer

How accurate German speech to text is in Deixis

The test used Google's FLEURS dataset, which has sentences read aloud by native speakers, and its German split, de_de: 80 clips, the 20 shortest plus 60 picked 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 7.4% words wrong: a little over seven words in a hundred. The evidence page has the method in full.

Deixis does German with NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, a speech model that runs on your own processor. On the same 80 clips, the multilingual Whisper small model that Deixis shipped before 1.6 got 11.1% of the words wrong, so the switch cut German mistakes by about a third.

Three honest limits on that number:

• It is read speech. People reading a written sentence aloud make fewer stops and restarts than people dictating an email. Expect more mistakes when you think out loud.
• It is standard German. Swiss German was not measured, and nothing on this page claims it. The same goes for strong regional accents.
• The time is one desktop's decode. 0.39 seconds is the median for the decode alone, on a 12-core desktop processor. A laptop is slower, and none of this was measured on a Mac.

German voice typing on Windows: what is already there

You may not need to install anything, and it is worth knowing why before you do.

Windows voice typing (Win+H) does German, online. Microsoft's support page, read on 4 November 2026, lists German among its languages and says voice typing uses online speech recognition powered by Azure Speech services, and that you need to be connected to the internet. No Microsoft page we read says it works offline in German or any other language. If you dictate on a train or in a building where the network is locked down, it stops.

Windows voice access does German on the PC. This is the free offline option, and it is a real one. On Windows 11 22H2 and later, voice access downloads a German language file once and then recognises speech on the computer itself, per Microsoft's set-up page (4 November 2026). It is built for controlling the whole PC by voice, with dictation as part of that, so it brings a set of spoken commands to learn. If that is what you want, it may suit you better than Deixis.

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

Dragon Professional 16 still sells a German edition, and it remains the serious choice for people who dictate all day and need its voice commands and macros. It runs only on Windows; Nuance stopped selling Dragon for Mac in 2018. Nuance publishes no price, so here is one German reseller's: software-express.de lists Dragon Professional 16 at €827.41 before VAT (4 November 2026). Dragon compared with Deixis.

Wispr Flow 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 do say that every dictation is transcribed in its cloud and that an account is required: your German audio leaves your computer every time. Training on your dictations is on by default on its Free and Pro plans. Wispr Flow compared with Deixis.

On a Mac, Apple Dictation does German on the device once its speech model is downloaded, per Apple's feature-availability page (4 November 2026). That is a free, on-device option already on your Mac. Deixis on the Mac uses the same chord idea as on Windows, Ctrl+Option, so if you work on both, you dictate the same way on each. Apple Dictation compared with Deixis.

What you get in German, and what you do not

What Deixis 1.6 promises in German:

• Push-to-talk dictation in any app. Hold, speak German, release. The text is typed at the cursor wherever you are, 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, German 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. Deixis never asks you to sign in to dictate.

What is not there yet, and you should know before you download:

• The polish is tuned for English. Cleanup, which tidies a sentence after it is recognised, the dictionary of your own words, the vocabulary packs (which are English word lists) and the punctuation Deixis adjusts to the field you are typing into are all built for English. We do not claim they work in German.
• Your own names are harder. Parakeet hears a dictionary word only by its sound, so an unusual surname or product name comes out right less often than it would with Whisper in English.
• One language at a time. You choose German; Deixis does not detect it, and dictating German and English in one sentence was not measured.
• Swiss German is not measured, and neither is dictation in a noisy room.
• Windows needs a processor with AVX2, Intel Haswell or AMD Excavator, 2013 or later. The Mac needs macOS 13 or later on Apple silicon. There is no Linux build, and Android follows later.

Free, and where it stops. German 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. If that is German, keep it; otherwise choose German.
3. Let it download the German speech model once, about 670 MB.
4. Click into any text field, hold Ctrl+Win (or Ctrl+Option on a Mac), say a sentence in German, and let go.

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