Languages & microphone
Select the language you speak, understand automatic detection and check the right input device.
On this page
Select your language#
Open Settings → Transcription → Language. Choose a specific language when you know what you will speak, or Detect automatically when you want Whisper to determine it. Save the change and check the active model.
The language picker shows common choices near the top and a wider catalogue below. The selected language influences engine Auto selection. Forcing an engine overrides that routing decision, so forcing Parakeet does not give it support for a language outside its trained set.
Parakeet’s 25 languages#
With Engine set to Auto, these selected languages route to Parakeet:
| Language | Code | Language | Code |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulgarian | bg | Croatian | hr |
| Czech | cs | Danish | da |
| Dutch | nl | English | en |
| Estonian | et | Finnish | fi |
| French | fr | German | de |
| Greek | el | Hungarian | hu |
| Italian | it | Latvian | lv |
| Lithuanian | lt | Maltese | mt |
| Polish | pl | Portuguese | pt |
| Romanian | ro | Russian | ru |
| Slovak | sk | Slovenian | sl |
| Spanish | es | Swedish | sv |
| Ukrainian | uk | — | — |
Other languages in the app’s catalogue route to Whisper in Auto mode, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean. Recognition quality varies across languages; a language appearing in the picker is not a guarantee of equal accuracy.
Automatic detection and mixed speech#
Detect automatically is a language choice, not automatic cloud recognition. Auto engine resolves that choice to local Whisper. Model files must still be present.
If short clips are detected incorrectly, choose the intended language explicitly and test again. Mixed-language passages, names and very short recordings can be harder to recognize. Vocabulary replacements can repair recurring text errors, but they do not retrain or seed the recognizer.
Choose the microphone you actually use#
In Settings → Transcription → Microphone, select your device or the system default. Save, then reopen guided setup’s microphone step to see a live level check.
- Check the headset or microphone’s physical mute switch.
- Check the selected Windows input device and its input level.
- Allow desktop microphone access in Windows privacy settings.
- Close another application if it is taking exclusive control of the microphone.
- Speak normally and watch the setup meter.
If you connect a different headset or change a device name, revisit the selection. A remembered microphone preference is not a promise that the same physical device remains connected.
Choose cleanup carefully across languages#
All-capital forms such as ER are protected from filler deletion. That does not solve every ambiguous lower-case word. Compare Heard and cleaned text in History to tell a recognition error from a cleanup change.