AI Voice Typing in 105 Languages, Now on Android and iPhone

Say you speak Hindi but want the text in Roman letters. Or you speak Brazilian Portuguese and want Brazilian spellings, not European ones. The voice keyboard has to know which one you mean, and until recently ours made that hard.

On Android you got 40 languages in one alphabetical list. On iPhone you got the same 40 as bare language codes in a flat menu, with no rows for script at all.

That changed with Android 8.19.0 (September 8, 2026) and iPhone versions 2.12 and 2.13 (September 2026). AI voice typing in CleverType now covers 105 languages. It's free to try on both platforms, and it tidies up what you say before it lands in the text field.

What's new

105 languages instead of 40

The picker used to stop at 40 languages. Now it has 105. At launch that came to 121 rows, since some languages get more than one row for script or region. We've kept adding since then (Sesotho, for one, and Saraiki in both native script and Roman letters), so today you'll see 125 rows.

Among the new ones are Filipino, Khmer, Malay, Sinhala, Amharic, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Zulu, Persian, Pashto, Somali, Kazakh, Uzbek, Assamese and Odia, plus Serbian in both Cyrillic and Latin letters. We didn't remove anything that was already there.

Rows for scripts and regions

On iPhone there used to be a single "Hindi" option, and the model decided which script you got. You'd dictate a message to your cousin and get it back in letters you don't type in.

Now, on both platforms, "Hindi (हिंदी)" gives you Devanagari and "Hindi (Roman / Hinglish)" gives you Roman letters, which suits the way Hinglish typing is growing across India. Urdu, Saraiki, Serbian and others work the same way. Regions get their own rows too, so Spanish (Spain) sits apart from Latin American Spanish, and Portuguese for Brazil is separate from Portuguese for Portugal.

A picker ordered for you

The old picker was one long A to Z list, and you had to scroll for your language every time. The new one pins "Auto detect" at the top. Under it comes Recent (your last 4 picks, newest first), then Suggested for you (languages spoken where you are), then All languages.

What shows up in Suggested depends on where you are. In Brazil it opens on Portuguese (Brazil). In Tanzania, Swahili. In the Philippines, Filipino. In India you'll see Hindi (हिंदी), then Hindi (Roman / Hinglish), then English, and in Pakistan it's Urdu (اردو).

Free on Android, and on by default

Before Android 8.16.0, AI voice typing was premium only. Free users who had Google voice typing installed got Google's recorder when they tapped the mic.

Since that release (August 21), "AI Voice Typing" is on by default for every plan. Turn it off and the mic goes back to Google voice typing.

A new recording panel on Android

Tap the mic on Android now and you'll see a scrolling waveform move as you speak. There's a red trash button to throw the recording away, a Send button, and a Transcribing label while the text is on its way.

Voice typing inside the iPhone keyboard

On iPhone, voice typing first showed up inside the CleverType keyboard in version 2.11 (late August 2026), and it opened to all users on August 29. You'll find the mic at the top right of the keyboard. Since version 2.13 there's no Accept or Delete step. The transcript goes straight into the text field, so the AI tabs can work on it right away.

Cleaner text

Spoken sentences are messy. You start over, you say "um", you change a meeting time halfway through. A cleanup step reached iPhone, desktop and Chrome on August 29, and a further update on November 1, 2026 brought the same setup to every platform.

It drops filler words like "um". When you change your mind mid-sentence, it keeps only the corrected version. And when you read out a list, it writes it as one:

• You say: "Let's meet at 5 pm, actually 6"
• You get: "Let's meet at 6 pm."

Punctuation got a lot better along the way. In our measurement, the share of dictated sentences ending with proper punctuation (. ? !) went from 47.2% to 85.4%, a gain of 38.2 points (707 vs 720 transcripts of 4 or more words).

How it works

Your phone only records. The audio clip is sent to CleverType's servers, where third-party AI models (from Google, with OpenAI as a backup) turn it into text.

So there's no language pack to download, and your phone isn't doing any heavy lifting. The flip side is that every dictation needs an internet connection. There's no offline mode, so if privacy matters most, see our guide to offline dictation software that works without the cloud.

Listening and cleanup happen in a single step. The model is told to make only five kinds of edits: punctuation and capitals, lists and line breaks, removing fillers and stutters, keeping only your final version when you correct yourself, and applying spellings you spell out. It's told never to rephrase, reorder, summarize, shorten or censor what you said, and never to fix your grammar. If you want your grammar fixed, dictate first and then open the grammar tab.

There is a small cost. The November update made the slowest 10% of dictations a little slower, from about 3.2 to 3.4 seconds before the text appears.

What the language chip actually does

The language you choose is the output language:

• Speech in that language is transcribed as is.
• A whole sentence spoken in another language is translated into the chosen language.
• Single words mixed in from another language stay as you said them.
• Auto detect never translates. Mixed speech keeps each part in its own language, and the script follows how you usually type.

Why script rows matter

Wrong script, and people throw the text away. When the transcript came out in a script the person doesn't type in, it got deleted 37.3% of the time, compared with 10.3% when the script matched.

Picking a script row makes the output follow it. In a small test on 7 Hindi clips, "Hindi (हिंदी)" gave Devanagari on all 7 and "Hindi (Roman / Hinglish)" gave Roman letters on all 7. Across Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Bengali, the chosen script held on 13 of 14 clips.

Why iPhone opens the app once

Custom keyboards on iPhone aren't allowed to use the microphone. Apple's developer guide says they "have no access to the device microphone, so dictation input is not possible." To get around that, the keyboard opens the CleverType app once per session to start the mic, and then you go back to whatever you were typing. While the session runs, you may see iOS's yellow mic dot.

How to set it up

Android

1. Open CleverType and go to Settings → Input & Typing → Voice Typing.
2. Check that AI Voice Typing is on (it's on by default).
3. Tap Spoken Language. Use Search languages… or browse Recent, Suggested for you and All languages, then tap Select. Leave it on Auto detect if you switch languages often.
4. In any app, tap the mic on the keyboard. If asked, tap Allow microphone.
5. Speak, then tap Send. Tap the red trash button to cancel.

To switch languages later, use the language chip inside the keyboard or the Write Anywhere voice sheet. If you ever want to start over, open the Voice Typing screen's menu and choose Reset.

iPhone

1. Update CleverType and make sure its keyboard is turned on.
2. In any app, tap the mic at the top right of the CleverType keyboard.
3. The first time in a session, CleverType opens its own app ("iOS doesn't let keyboards use the mic, so we'll open CleverType once to turn it on"). Allow microphone access if iOS asks.
4. Turn on voice typing there, then swipe back to your app. Talking starts automatically.
5. Speak. The text is typed at your cursor as soon as it arrives.

Examples

Here's the cleanup at work on things you'd actually say.

A few more behaviors are worth knowing:

• Say "scratch that" and it drops itself along with the words you just said.
• "Question mark", "comma", "new line" or "smiley face" said as commands become the symbol or emoji. Inside a sentence, they stay as words.
• If you spell out an email address, it's joined into one, and "git hub" becomes GitHub.
• Deliberate repetition ("no no no") and slang are kept as spoken.

Tips

If the script matters to you, pick the exact row, such as "Urdu (Roman)". If you mix languages in the same breath, stay on Auto detect. For more on typing in several languages, read our guide to the best AI keyboard for multilingual users.

Speak in chunks. Each recording stops at 2 minutes, so a long voice note goes better as a few shorter ones.

On iPhone you can cut down on app hops. In CleverType, set Auto-stop listening to 1 hour instead of the default 5 minutes. The trade-off is that the mic session (and the yellow dot) stays active longer.

Troubleshooting

Here's what the on-screen messages mean, plus a couple of odd cases on Android.

• "Oops! Internet connection lost." Dictation needs a connection. On Android, tap Retry. If you don't return to the field within about 5 minutes, you'll see "Your unsent dictation was discarded."
• "We didn't catch that. Tap the mic and try again": the mic heard no speech. The model is told to output nothing for silence or noise rather than guess.
• Urdu letters when you speak Hindi or Hinglish: choose "Hindi (Roman / Hinglish)" or "Hindi (हिंदी)" instead of Auto.
• Text came out translated: the chip is set to another language. Switch to Auto detect.
• "Recording stopped because you left the app" (Android): leaving for the home screen or another app mid-recording stops and discards it.
• Screen rotated and the field closed (Android): the text is saved to the keyboard clipboard, unless clipboard history is off or the field was private.
• "Voice typing is off" (iPhone): the session ended because of the auto-stop timer or because the app was closed. Tap the mic, open CleverType once, and swipe back.
• "Microphone access is off" (iPhone): enable the microphone for CleverType in iPhone Settings. For "The mic didn't respond" or "Transcription failed", try again.
• "Free voice limit reached" (Android) or "Voice typing limit reached" (iPhone): your free 120 seconds are used up.
• AI voice typing is off but CleverType's recorder appeared (Android): this can happen on the first mic tap after the keyboard starts.

How it compares

If you're on a plane, or you'd rather your audio never left your phone, Apple Dictation is the better pick. There's no app switch, and the keyboard stays open during dictation, so you can type a word, say a sentence, and keep going. With Apple Intelligence in iOS 27, Apple says an on-device model also improves spelling, punctuation and capitalization, in English on iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air or later.

Gboard is free and already there. Google notes that talk-to-text "doesn't work with all languages", and to switch your voice language you first have to enable several keyboard languages. Some Pixel phones also get Advanced voice typing.

Samsung Keyboard has its own voice input. Samsung doesn't publish a list of voice languages, and its help page says supported functions "may vary depending on the country or the device".

What CleverType adds is the cleanup step, an explicit script choice for each language, a picker ordered by your country and recent picks, and one language list shared across Android, iPhone and desktop. We think it's most useful if you write in more than one script, or switch between languages during the day. To see how other options stack up, check our roundup of the best voice-to-text AI keyboard apps.

Why we built it

We picked the new languages based on where our users actually are. But a longer list only helps if people use it, and mostly they didn't. Across 502,350 transcriptions from August 1 to September 6, 2026, 71.0% ran on Auto. In Spain (95.2%), Norway (95.1%) and Ukraine (93.9%), nearly everyone stayed on Auto even though their language was already in the list. That's why the new picker puts the languages you're likely to want near the top.

Script was the other problem, and we heard about it in support mail. People kept writing in because their voice typing came out in the wrong language or script. Often it was Hindi and Hinglish speakers getting Urdu letters. A script row lets you tell the keyboard which one you want.

Limitations

Some of these are platform rules, and some are gaps we still need to fill.

• Needs internet. There's no offline mode.
• iPhone needs one app hop per session, and the mic indicator stays on while the session is active.
• 2 minutes per recording on both platforms.
• Free use is 120 seconds of audio in total on Android and iPhone, counted from signup. Voice has its own allowance, separate from AI words, so you can run out of voice time while grammar and the other AI tools still work.
• Some gaps in the list: no Akan/Twi or Kirundi yet, and "Kurdish" means Kurmanji, not Sorani.
• Suggestions aren't complete everywhere. In India, Suggested shows Hindi, Hinglish and English first. Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Punjabi and Odia are in All languages (and in Recent once you pick them). Some countries get no Suggested block at all, only Auto and the A to Z list.
• It doesn't fix your grammar. Use the grammar tab for that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Try it

Available for Android and iPhone.

Download CleverType