German speech to text on your Mac

Numbers came out as words, the way they were said: “zwei Darstellungsfehler” and “drei, vier Tage”. Weekdays kept their German form too, down to the one-word Donnerstagabend, and the casual “Ja, mach ich” was written as spoken, not corrected into something stiffer.

Punctuation is looser than spelling. Question marks landed where the questions were, and the commas before aber and um … zu were in place, but the comma after “Hallo Jonas”, the colon after “Rezeptanwendung” and the full stop after “Genau” were missing. A line can also stop before its sentence ends, so a German verb can open the next line, as “prüfen?” does above.

That setting starts on your Mac’s own language. If your Mac is set to English, choose German there, or Auto-detect to let NoteOwl recognise the language each time. Meetings you record follow the same setting.

Recordings you import don’t need it: NoteOwl always detects their language by itself. That is how the sample above was transcribed, with nothing chosen in advance.

At work, that means the Besprechung and the Protokoll someone has to write afterwards, client and supplier calls, interviews and lectures. The sample is a product team deciding whether a recipe app ships on Monday, read in standard German from Germany.

Accuracy varies with accent. The sample doesn’t show Swiss German or a strong regional dialect, so if that is how you speak, try NoteOwl on a short recording of your own before you rely on it for a long meeting.

When you dictate, the panel offers Polish as you stop: it’s free, it tidies punctuation, and NoteOwl tells it to keep the language you spoke. For surnames, company names and product names, add a Vocabulary rule, part of NoteOwl Pro: type the word the way NoteOwl writes it, then the way it should be spelled, and every transcript after that uses your spelling.