Spanish voice dictation that needs no fixing afterwards

Dictating in Spanish half works in almost every app, and the reason is boring: transcription is not the problem. Speech engines have understood Spanish well for years. What goes wrong is everything that comes after.

The four places it breaks

The opening marks

In Spanish a question opens with ¿ and closes with ?. Almost no dictation app puts them in, because general purpose models are trained on English and English does not have them. So you get "cómo estás?" and you fix it by hand, every day, forever.

Getting them right is not cosmetic: you have to know where the question starts, which is not always the start of the sentence. In "Hola Sofi, cómo venís con el informe" it opens at "cómo", not at "Hola".

Voseo

"Acordate", "creá", "mandáselo", "reservá". An engine that assumes the tuteo forms hands you back "acuérdate", or worse, eats the accent. It is the kind of error that breaks nothing and forces you to reread every sentence.

Filler words

Talking is not writing. "Che, o sea, me parece que el partido de mañana, viste, lo tendríamos que mover" is a perfectly ordinary spoken sentence and an unreadable written one. Removing the fillers without touching the rest is harder than it looks, because "che" and "viste" are sometimes fillers and sometimes not.

Work Spanglish

If you work in tech, your Spanish has English inside it and you conjugate it: mergear, pushear, deployar, un pull request, un branch. An engine that hears "creá una brunch nueva" and writes "brunch" did not get the language wrong, it got the domain wrong.

What DeftNib does about it

It treats all of that as the main case, not as a localization. Opening marks, voseo, fillers and mixed vocabulary live inside the pipeline, and there is a file of cases that a quality evaluation runs against every time the code is touched. The examples on the home page come out of that file, not out of a demo assembled for the page.

And all of it happens inside your Mac. No server processes your voice, there is no account, and there is no subscription. How it compares to the cloud apps.

Try it with your own voice

It is the only thing that convinces. The free plan is 4,000 words a week with every feature, no account and no expiry.