Portuguese
Dictation thatspeaks Portuguese.
Almost every dictation app advertises a hundred languages. Very few can tell Lisbon from São Paulo, and none of them say so on the pricing page. This is what actually changes when you dictate in Portuguese, and what to do about it.
The short answer
Portuguese is two written standards and many accents, not one bucket. A tool that treats it as one will keep handing you the wrong words, the wrong verb forms and the wrong spelling. Choose one that lets you pick European or Brazilian Portuguese explicitly, and that leaves the English words you mix in alone.
What it is
Speaking instead of typing.
Voice dictation turns speech into text while you speak, inside whatever you are already writing in. It is not file transcription, which you run afterwards on a recording. It is not an assistant either: nothing is being asked to do anything, the words simply arrive where your cursor is.
On a Mac there are three practical ways to do it. macOS has dictation built in, free. Your phone keyboard has it. And there are dedicated apps that listen while you hold a key, clean the text up, and paste it into the app in front of you. All three understand Portuguese. None of them understand it equally.
Worth knowing
Raw speed is not the interesting number. Most people speak several times faster than they type, so every tool looks fast in a demo. What decides whether you keep using one is how often you have to go back and fix it.
Your options today
Four ways to dictate in Portuguese.
| Option | What it does well | Where it stops |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Dictation, built into macOS | Free, already installed, and it lists European and Brazilian Portuguese as separate languages. | It writes what you said. Filler words, false starts and repeats land in the document exactly as they left your mouth, and it is not built for switching language inside a sentence. |
| Phone keyboards | The dictation on iOS and Android is genuinely good in both Portuguese standards, and costs nothing. | It is on your phone. The writing that pays your rent happens on a computer, in ten different apps. |
| Audio transcription tools | Built for recordings and meetings: file in, transcript out, with speaker labels and timestamps. | You upload and wait. It never puts a word into the app you are writing in, which is the whole point of dictation. |
| Dedicated dictation apps | Hold a key anywhere, speak, and cleaned-up text is pasted into whatever app has focus. | Most are English-first. Portuguese is one line in a list of a hundred languages, and usually one line, not two. |
Checked August 2026.
The part nobody tests
Two Portugueses, and the machine has to pick one.
Words that are simply different
Telemóvel in Portugal, celular in Brazil. Autocarro and ônibus. Casa de banho and banheiro. A model leaning Brazilian hears a Portuguese speaker say telemóvel and writes something else, and fixing it costs more than the sentence saved.
Grammar that pulls in two directions
Brazilian Portuguese lives in the gerund: estou fazendo. European Portuguese says estou a fazer. Pronoun placement moves. The everyday second person is not the same. These are not typos to clean up later, they are what the sentence should have been.
An accent the model may never have heard
European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels hard, and most Portuguese training audio is Brazilian. Error rates run higher, and Portuguese speakers have been told for years to speak more clearly. It is a training-data gap, not a speaking problem.
The English you mix in
Real work sounds like: preciso de fazer deploy do branch antes da daily. A tool locked to one language turns those English words into Portuguese nonsense. A tool with no language setting at all often flips the whole sentence into English.
None of this is exotic. It is what an ordinary Tuesday sounds like for 260 million people. It is also the part an English-first dictation app never tests.
What we built
Portuguese as a first language, not a checkbox.
Sonira asks which Portuguese you speak, European or Brazilian, and carries that answer through transcription and cleanup, so what lands matches the standard you actually write in. English terms dropped into a Portuguese sentence stay English. Hold a key, speak, let go, and the cleaned text is pasted into whatever app is in front of you.
Honest note: the current public build is the dictation core, with European and Brazilian Portuguese selectable. The most recent Portuguese work, and read-aloud, ship in the next public build.
Hold a key. Speak. The words land where the cursor is.
Step by step
Dictating in Portuguese, start to finish.
- 01
Pick your Portuguese explicitly
European or Brazilian, chosen by you. A tool that never asks has already decided, and it usually decided Brazilian, because that is where the training audio came from.
- 02
Give the microphone permission
macOS asks once, per app, and nothing works until you say yes. If dictation is silently producing nothing, this is the first thing to check.
- 03
Choose a key you can hold
Dictation you have to click is dictation you will quietly stop using. One key, held down while you speak, released when you finish, is the whole interaction.
- 04
Speak in whole sentences
Punctuation is inferred from the shape of what you say. A complete sentence spoken at a normal pace transcribes better than a string of fragments, in every language.
- 05
Judge it on a real paragraph
Every tool looks good on one clean sentence. Dictate something you actually have to send, with your own names, jargon and accent in it, then count the corrections.
Anything that survives step five is a tool you will still be using in a month.
Good to know
Questions, answered.
- 01Do dictation apps support Portuguese?
- Almost all of them list it. Far fewer separate European from Brazilian Portuguese, which is where the difference actually lives. Apple Dictation lists both. Many third-party apps have a single Portuguese entry and quietly lean Brazilian.
- 02What is the difference between European and Brazilian Portuguese for dictation?
- Vocabulary, verb constructions, pronoun placement and pronunciation. Same language, two written standards. A dictation tool has to choose one to write in, and if it chooses for you it will choose wrong about half the time.
- 03Is European Portuguese harder for speech recognition?
- Generally yes. European Portuguese reduces unstressed vowels much more than Brazilian Portuguese, and most Portuguese training audio is Brazilian, so recognition error rates run higher. That is a gap in the data, not a problem with the speaker.
- 04Can I mix English words into a Portuguese sentence?
- You should be able to, because half the technical vocabulary in both markets is English. Sonira is built to leave English terms as English inside a Portuguese sentence rather than transliterating them into something nobody writes.
- 05Is the dictation built into my Mac good enough for Portuguese?
- For plenty of writing, yes, and it costs nothing. It sets both Portuguese standards up separately and works everywhere you can type. The step-by-step guide on this site covers exactly how to turn it on, and where it stops.
- 06What does Sonira cost?
- It is free while it is in beta. Download it, dictate a real paragraph in your Portuguese, and tell me where it got things wrong.
Write Portuguese without typing it.
Free while we're in beta.
New to dictation? Start with the Mac guide.