Ukrainian Voice Typing

Ukrainian uses an apostrophe inside words — з’їсти, м’ясо, п’ять. It is not decoration and not optional: it marks that the consonant before it stays hard and the vowel after it is iotated. A word written without it is misspelled.

Dictation drops it frequently, because it corresponds to a break rather than to a sound of its own. Since the omission is systematic, scanning for words that should carry one is quick and catches most of what you need to fix.

Ukrainian has two letters where Russian has one: г, a soft voiced fricative, and ґ, a hard g. ґ is genuinely rare — ґанок, ґудзик, ґрунт — and close enough in speech that recognition almost always writes г.

For most writing this passes unnoticed. Where the word matters, it is a one-character correction, and ґ is on the Ukrainian keyboard if you would rather type it.

Ukrainian and Russian share most of the Cyrillic alphabet, and a recogniser that is uncertain can fall toward the language it has more data for. What comes back then is valid Cyrillic with Russian spellings or vocabulary — the same failure mode Marathi has with Hindi.

The reliable tell is the letters Ukrainian has and Russian does not: і, ї, є and ґ. If a passage of dictated Ukrainian contains none of them, or contains и where і belongs, that is where it drifted.

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 Ukrainian speech support will not respond to the button.