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Languages and engines

The four speech engines, how to switch, the 25 languages Canary understands, translation to English, and the tray quick-switch.

Keebye runs speech-to-text on your Mac with one of four engines. Parakeet is the English-tuned default; Canary adds 25 languages; Apple Speech needs no download.

The engines

  • "Native (Apple Speech) — free, no download": on-device Apple Speech in your system default locale only, with a 15-second timeout. Needs Speech Recognition permission.
  • "Parakeet — Standard (Int8) — ~640 MB": the default, tuned for English.
  • "Parakeet — Max (FP32) — ~2.4 GB": the same model at full precision.
  • "Canary — Multilingual (Int8) — ~1 GB": 25 languages with optional translation to English.

Switching engines

Settings › Speech engine. The choice saves immediately and hot-swaps on your next dictation. Choosing an engine does not download it: press "Download model (~size)" when Settings shows "Not downloaded yet — dictation keeps using the current model until this finishes." When the files are present it shows "Model ready."; the Native engine shows "Uses Apple Speech — nothing to download."

The 25 Canary languages

Settings lists exactly these 25 languages, in this order. Pick the language you speak so Canary does not drift between languages. The pinned language is read for each utterance, so a change applies to your next dictation.

  • English
  • Romanian
  • Bulgarian
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Estonian
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Maltese
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Russian
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Ukrainian

Translate to English as I speak

Settings › Speech engine › "Translate to English as I speak" (off by default, Canary only). Speak in any of the 25 languages and the inserted text comes out in English. The Settings hint reads: "Canary is multilingual: pick the language you speak so it doesn't drift between languages. Optionally translate your speech to English on the way in. (Language & translation apply to Canary only.)"

Tray quick-switch

The tray menu's "Dictation Language" submenu lists 11 languages for quick switching: English, Romanian, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Settings exposes all 25.