How to dictate in Spanish on your Mac

Every Mac can take dictation in Spanish for free. You add Spanish as a Dictation language once, then speak. These steps follow Apple's Dictation guide for macOS 27, and the language lists below come from Apple's macOS feature availability page, both checked October 21, 2026.

1. Choose Apple menu > System Settings, then click Keyboard in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down.
2. Go to Dictation and turn it on. If a message appears, click Enable.
3. Click Edit next to Languages, select the Spanish you speak (for example Spanish (Mexico) or Spanish (Spain)), then click Done.
4. Click where the text should go, then press the Microphone key, your Dictation shortcut, or choose Edit > Start Dictation.
5. Speak in Spanish. Press Escape, the Microphone key or the shortcut to stop. Dictation also stops by itself after 30 seconds without speech.

The text under Dictation in Keyboard settings says whether your dictation is processed on your Mac or sent to Apple. New to all this? Start with how to dictate on a Mac.

Apple lists five versions of Spanish for Dictation: Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and the United States. All five can run on the Mac itself (Apple's “On-Device and Modeless Dictation” list), which means no connection once the speech model has downloaded.

Auto-punctuation, where the Mac puts in commas, full stops and question marks for you, is listed for four of them: Spain, Mexico, Colombia and the United States. Chile isn't on that list, so with Spanish (Chile) you say the punctuation yourself. If you speak Spanish from somewhere else, such as Argentina or Peru, pick the closest version. Apple doesn't list one for every country.

The feature availability page is the one to check if Apple changes this. Your Keyboard settings show what your Mac really offers.

Add both languages under Languages. While you dictate, click the language shown next to the cursor and pick the other one, or press the Globe key if your keyboard has one. Apple Dictation doesn't work out which language you're speaking by itself, so you switch each time you change.

That's fine if you write one email in Spanish and the next in English. It gets tiring if you reply to a Spanish Slack thread, then an English one, then back again, all morning.

We make Koi, so read this part with that in mind. Koi is a Mac app whose dictation types in any app, written on your Mac. Its built-in speech model, NVIDIA's Parakeet v3, covers 25 European languages, Spanish among them, and works out which one you're speaking by itself. Nothing to switch, and nothing to download first.

1. Install Koi and finish its short welcome. Parakeet v3 is already in use.
2. In Koi's Settings, under Dictation, leave Language on Auto-detect, or pick Spanish if you only ever speak Spanish.
3. Click where the text should go, in any app, and tap Fn + ⌥ once.
4. Speak in Spanish. The words appear as you talk.
5. Go quiet and Koi stops by itself, or tap Fn + ⌥ again.

The speech model runs on your Mac, so dictation never goes online and works without a connection. Koi runs on macOS 14 or later, Apple silicon and Intel. The dictation page shows the rest of what it does.

How accurate is it in Spanish? NVIDIA's model card for Parakeet v3 reports 3.45% of words wrong on the FLEURS Spanish test, for the original model. Koi runs a converted copy, and we haven't measured Spanish ourselves. Your microphone and how you speak matter more than a test score, so try it on your own words.

• Works in Spanish: the “um”s and “uh”s are dropped, a numbered list said as “1. … 2. …” becomes a list, and each app gets its style (no full stop at the end in chat apps).
• Your words: names and terms in Settings, under Dictation, are spelled your way in any language. Our guide to adding words covers it.
• Snippets: save a phrase like “mi dirección” and your address, and saying the phrase types the address.
• English only: a correction said out loud (“at 3, no, 4”), spoken list words like “first” and “second”, and the commands “new line”, “new paragraph” and “clear all”. Koi doesn't take those in Spanish.
• Mixing: we haven't tested Spanish and English inside one sentence. Try it on your own words first.

Parakeet is the fastest of Koi's seven models, but you can switch to another in Settings, under Dictation, each a free download. All of these list Spanish: Whisper Base, Small and Large v3 Turbo (OpenAI), Qwen3-ASR (Alibaba), Cohere Transcribe and Granite Speech (IBM). Cohere and Granite need you to pick Spanish rather than finding it themselves, and in Koi Granite writes without punctuation or capitals.

Speak Spanish but need English text? Whisper Base, Whisper Small and Granite Speech can type what you say in English, with the Type in English switch. Our guide to speaking any language and typing in English walks through it, and Koi's speech models compares all seven.

Almost always, the wrong language is picked. Check these in order:

• With Apple Dictation, look at the language shown next to the cursor while you dictate. If it says English, click it and pick Spanish, or press the Globe key.
• If Spanish isn't in that list, it isn't added yet: System Settings > Keyboard, Dictation, Edit next to Languages.
• If Dictation won't start at all, the microphone may be the problem. Pick yours under Microphone source in the same settings.
• In Koi, a very short phrase can be too little for the model to tell the language. If that keeps happening, set Language in Settings, under Dictation, to Spanish rather than Auto-detect, and the model is told.
• In Koi, check that Type in English is off. With it on, Spanish comes out in English on purpose.

One more thing that catches people out: the names you use. A colleague called Ximena or a brand like Mercado Libre may come out misspelled in either app. Koi's Your words list fixes those, and it reads the names on your screen as you start, on the Mac, so a name already in the email you're answering comes out right.

Dictation is your words going out. Calls are the other way round. If you work in English but think in Spanish, Koi can show what the others say on arecorded call at the bottom of your screen in Spanish, with their own words under it. Turn on “Live captions in my language” in Settings, under Koi, and pick Spanish. It needs macOS 26 or later.

The translation is done on your Mac by Apple's Translation, and the captions never show in a screen you share. If Spanish isn't downloaded on your Mac yet, Settings offers it, and until then the words show as they were said. The live captions page has the details.

• You dictate in Spanish now and then, in one language at a time: Apple Dictation. It's free and on-device for every Spanish it lists.
• You switch between Spanish and English all day: Koi, so you never pick the language by hand.
• You need your Spanish typed out in English: Koi with Whisper Small and Type in English.
• You also want calls recorded and transcribed in Spanish: Koi's Record calls and Transcribe use the same model.

Koi needs a paid plan. Pro is $20 a month, or $192 a year, after a 3-day free trial that needs a card. Lifetime is paid once, from $59. Every plan has unlimited dictation. See pricing, and if Apple's shortcut does nothing at all, our guide to fixing Mac dictation.

The same model also writes down your recorded calls and the audio and video files you drop in, so a Spanish meeting comes out in Spanish.