Chinese Voice Typing

Two hard limits worth knowing before you start. Recognition is requested as zh-CN, so it returns Simplified characters — there is no setting that produces Traditional, and writing for Taiwan or Hong Kong means converting afterwards.

And it is Mandarin. Cantonese is not a variant here but a different spoken language, with its own vocabulary and grammar; speaking it will not give you slightly worse results, it will give you the wrong language.

Almost everyone types Chinese through pinyin: enter the romanisation, then choose the character from a candidate list. That second step is the part that takes the time.

Dictation does not use pinyin at all. It goes from sound to characters, choosing them from context, and there is no candidate list to work through. For fluent speakers it is much faster than typing — and it means the errors arrive already committed rather than as a wrong selection you can see coming.

Mandarin distinguishes words by tone, so an unclear tone is a different word before character selection even begins. And even with the tone right, a syllable maps to many characters: 是, 事, 市, 试 all read shì.

Context usually resolves it. When it does not, what you get is a well-formed sentence containing the wrong word — no typo to spot, nothing visually wrong. Proofread dictated Chinese for sense; a spelling-style scan will find nothing because there is nothing of that kind to find.

The microphone is your browser’s. On Chrome and Edge the audio is sent to the browser vendor’s speech service and text comes back; WorldTyping is never in that path and never receives audio. The text stays in your browser, saved locally so a reload does not lose your draft.

That is also why dictation needs an internet connection, and why a browser without Mandarin speech support will not respond to the button.