Italian speech to text, on your own computer

How accurate Italian speech to text is in Deixis

The test used Google's FLEURS dataset of sentences read aloud, and its Italian split, it_it: 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 3.4% words wrong. The evidence page has the method in full.

Deixis does Italian with NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, which runs on your own processor. On the same 80 clips, the multilingual Whisper small model that Deixis shipped before 1.6 got 9.9% of the words wrong: Parakeet gets about a third as many wrong.

What the figure does not cover:

• Regional accents. The dataset's Italian is Italy's standard Italian, and no regional accent was measured separately, so we make no claim for one.
• Free speech and noise. Reading a sentence aloud is easier than dictating your own thoughts, and nothing here tested a noisy room.
• Your laptop or a Mac. 0.48 seconds is the median decode on one desktop processor. A laptop is slower, and none of these figures were measured on a Mac.

Italian voice typing on Windows

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

Voice typing (Win+H) does Italian, online. Its page lists Italian (Italy) 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 Italian.

Voice access now does Italian on the PC. Microsoft's set-up page for voice access lists Italian, and its "what's new" page says voice access now supports Italian. On Windows 11 22H2 and later it downloads the language once and then recognises speech on the computer itself. It is free and offline, and it is built for controlling the whole PC by voice, with dictation as one part. Some of Microsoft's older pages still give a shorter language list without Italian; the set-up page is the current one.

The old Speech Recognition never had Italian. Microsoft lists it as English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese and Spanish only, and says voice access replaced it on Windows 11 22H2 and later in September 2024. People on an Italian Windows report seeing the message that speech recognition "is not available for the current display language", and Italian is not on that list.

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

Dragon Professional 16 is sold in Italian and remains the serious choice for people who dictate all day with voice commands and macros. It runs only on Windows; Nuance stopped selling Dragon for Mac in 2018. Nuance publishes no price; CampuStore lists the full Italian licence at €1,016.26 including VAT, and Espresso lists the upgrade from version 15 at €409.02 before VAT (both 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 say every dictation is transcribed in its cloud and that you need an account, so your Italian audio leaves your computer each 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 Italian on the device once its speech model is downloaded, per Apple's feature-availability page (4 November 2026). It is already on your Mac and free. Deixis does the same job on Windows and the Mac alike, with one chord on each. Apple Dictation compared with Deixis.

What you get in Italian, and what you do not

What Deixis 1.6 promises in Italian:

• Push-to-talk dictation in any app. Hold, speak Italian, 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, Italian 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 Italian.
• 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 Italian; Deixis does not detect it, and switching between Italian and English inside a sentence was not measured.
• Regional accents 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. Android follows later.

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

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