Portuguese speech to text, on your own computer

How accurate Portuguese speech to text is in Deixis

The test used Google's FLEURS dataset of sentences read aloud. Its Portuguese split is Brazilian Portuguese, pt_br, so that is what the figure describes: 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 5.6% words wrong, between five and six words in a hundred. The evidence page has the method in full.

Deixis does Portuguese 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 9.6% of the words wrong, so Parakeet makes about two in five fewer mistakes.

What the figure does not cover:

• European Portuguese. The figure is for Brazilian Portuguese. Portuguese as spoken in Portugal was not measured, so we make no claim for it, and neither were Brazil's regional accents separately.
• 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. 0.41 seconds is the median decode on one desktop processor. A laptop is slower, and none of these figures were measured on a Mac.

Portuguese voice typing on Windows

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

Voice typing (Win+H) does Portuguese, online only. Its page lists Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese (Portugal), and its Brazilian Portuguese version 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 Portuguese. Your voice goes to Microsoft every time.

Voice access has no Portuguese. 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. Portuguese is not among them, and neither was it in the old Windows Speech Recognition, which voice access replaced.

Word can dictate in Portuguese, with Microsoft 365. Word's Dictate fully supports Portuguese (Brazil) and lists Portuguese (Portugal) as a preview language, which Microsoft says may have lower accuracy or limited punctuation. Microsoft says Dictate is only for Microsoft 365 subscribers, needs a reliable internet connection, and sends your speech to Microsoft.

Google Docs voice typing does Portuguese in Docs. It works in the latest Chrome, Edge or Safari, only inside Google Docs and Slides speaker notes, and with a Google account. Google says your browser controls the speech-to-text service, and its voice commands work only in English.

Dragon has no Portuguese desktop edition. Nuance sells no Portuguese edition of Dragon Professional: its last published language list had none, and its regional sites have no Brazil or Portugal (4 November 2026). Dragon Medical lists Brazilian and European Portuguese, but that is Nuance's medical product, sold for clinical work.

Where Deixis differs is that it gives you Portuguese recognition on your own Windows PC, in every program, with nothing to subscribe to. It runs on the Mac too, we publish how accurate it is, and what leaves your computer is listed byte by byte.

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 Portuguese 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 Brazilian Portuguese on the device once its speech model is downloaded, per Apple's feature-availability page (4 November 2026). European Portuguese is not on Apple's on-device list, so it goes to Apple's servers. Apple Dictation compared with Deixis.

What you get in Portuguese, and what you do not

What Deixis 1.6 promises in Portuguese:

• Push-to-talk dictation in any app. Hold, speak Portuguese, 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, Portuguese 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 Portuguese.
• 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 Portuguese; Deixis does not detect it, and switching between Portuguese and English inside a sentence was not measured.
• European Portuguese is not measured. The figure is Brazilian Portuguese.
• 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. Portuguese 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 Portuguese system that is Portuguese; 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 sentence in Portuguese, and let go.

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