# Multilingual dictation for Mac

Canonical page: https://flit.fyi/use-cases/multilingual

**Speak one language. Write in another.** You think in one language and your colleagues read another. Most dictation tools make you declare which language you are in before every sentence, then hand you a translation you did not ask for. Flit works out what you are speaking in the first seconds and only translates when you tell it to.

## What slows multilingual professionals down

- Switching language means a trip to settings, every time.
- The tool translates when you wanted your own words kept.
- Non-English output arrives unpunctuated and unformatted.
- Names get respelled differently depending on the language you spoke.

## What Flit does for multilingual professionals

### It works out the language

Flit identifies what you are speaking in the first seconds and picks a capable engine per dictation, so a bilingual conversation does not mean a trip to Settings. More than 1,600 languages, 30 of them transcribing as you speak. The widest coverage comes from Meta’s Omnilingual model, so accuracy varies by language.

### Translate only when you ask

Set a target language and speak whatever you think in. Off by default: without it, your words are never translated or transliterated, whatever language they are in.

### Formatted in your language too

Hesitation sounds, punctuation, and sentence breaks are cleaned up in every language, not only English. If the model ever answers in the wrong language, Flit throws that result away and keeps your own words.

### Words scoped to a language

A dictionary term can be set to one language, so a name spelled one way in German does not fight the way you spell it in English.

## Finished text, not a transcript

Said: "können wir uns äh am freitag um halb elf treffen"

Flit wrote, in Mail: Can we meet on Friday at 10:30?

“Halb elf” is half eleven in German, which is 10:30. Meaning, not word-for-word.

## Why choose Flit over Wispr Flow

Flit detects the language you speak and can write it in another, all on your Mac, so it works in more than 1,600 languages with wifi off.

## Questions

**Which languages transcribe as I speak?**

30 languages stream live: Parakeet’s 25 European languages, plus Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi and Korean through Voxtral Realtime. Every other language also runs entirely on your Mac, and those dictations arrive after you release the key rather than during.

**Will it translate without me asking?**

No. Translation is off by default and needs an explicit target language. There is also a guard that discards any formatting result that came back in a different language than you spoke.

**Can I mix languages in one sentence?**

Code-switching works, and detection follows the dominant language of the utterance. For a language your engine cannot handle, Flit re-routes to one that can.

Every persona: [who Flit is for](https://flit.fyi/use-cases). Flit: [flit.fyi](https://flit.fyi/).