Bengali voice typing online

Bengali (Bangladesh) or Bengali (India)

The dropdown has two Bengali settings, and the choice matters more than it looks. Both write the same script as ordinary Unicode text, so the result pastes into a Facebook post, Gmail or a Word file without a special font. The difference is in the listening. Bangla in Bangladesh and in West Bengal differs in accent and in everyday words: water, for instance, is usually পানি in Bangladesh and জল in West Bengal. Google runs bn-BD and bn-IN as separate settings, so choose the one closest to the way you talk, and if it keeps mishearing you, say the same sentence with the other and keep whichever needs fewer fixes.

Everyday Bangla borrows English freely: অফিস, মোবাইল, মিটিং, ট্রেন. Written Bengali already spells such words in its own script, often with the ্যা sign it uses for the vowel of English words like bank and app (ব্যাংক, অ্যাপ), so a Bengali-script spelling is usually the right result. Whether a borrowed word arrives that way or in Latin letters is up to the recogniser. What it cannot do is keep a word in Latin letters because you need it so: an email address, a brand name or a booking code. Type those in afterwards, or switch the dropdown to English (India) for that sentence and back again; the text already in the box stays put.

Bengali digits are not a formality. Bangladeshi news sites such as Prothom Alo print their timestamps in them (১৩ মিনিট আগে, 13 minutes ago), while a web form’s phone number field may accept only 0 to 9. This page leaves digits exactly as the recogniser returns them, so check which set you got, and watch ৪ in particular: it is four, although it looks like a Western 8. If you want the taka sign ৳ rather than the word টাকা, type it; in Avro Phonetic it is on the dollar key.

The dari, the dot and the question mark

Bengali closes a sentence with the dari (দাঁড়ি), the upright stroke ।. Unicode has no separate Bengali dari, so it is the same character as the Hindi danda. Commas, question marks, exclamation marks and quotation marks came into Bengali from English in the nineteenth century and work as they do in English text.

The Western dot still has a job: abbreviations, such as ড. before the name of someone with a doctorate, or মো., short for মোহাম্মদ, before a name. The same abbreviation also turns up as মোঃ, with the visarga sign, or as মো: with a colon, sometimes all three in one article. Pick one form for a document and keep to it, and do not let a dot stand in for a dari at the end of a sentence.

Questions need a spelling check as well as a mark. Bangla Academy’s standard spelling writes কি, with the short i, for the particle in a yes-or-no question and কী, with the long i, for what: তুমি কি আসবে? (will you come?) but তুমি কী খাবে? (what will you eat?). Both are pronounced ki, so the recogniser cannot hear which one you meant. Check every কি and কী as you add the question marks.

None of these marks can be spoken on this page. Its punctuation commands exist only in English and are disabled while either Bengali setting is selected, and it has no command for দাঁড়ি or কমা. In Avro Phonetic the full stop key types a dari and a full stop followed by a backtick types the Western dot, so both are one keystroke away when you go back over the text. Avoid the look-alikes people reach for on an English keyboard, a pipe character or a plain full stop at the end of a sentence: they are different characters, so search, copy-editing tools and screen readers treat them differently from a real dari.

Letters that sound the same

Bengali spelling keeps distinctions that modern pronunciation has lost. ই and ঈ are both pronounced as a plain i, and উ and ঊ both as u. ণ is almost always said exactly like ন, and য at the start of a word sounds like জ. শ, ষ and স are often all pronounced as the same sh sound. A recogniser cannot hear which letter you meant, so it chooses a spelling from the words it already knows.

For common words that works well. It is weakest on personal names, place names and rarer vocabulary, where two spellings sound identical and nothing in the sentence tells them apart: a name written with ণ or ঈ can easily come back with ন or ই. Check names letter by letter before you send anything.

Spelling is also not fully settled. Bangla Academy in Dhaka and Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi in Kolkata each publish their own standard spelling rules, and older spellings survive alongside reformed ones, so both সরকারি and the older সরকারী are still in everyday use. The recogniser’s choice may not match the style your school, newspaper or office follows.

Unicode Bengali and Bijoy files

A lot of printing and publishing work in Bangladesh still runs on Bijoy, a keyboard and font system in use since 1988, with ANSI fonts such as SutonnyMJ that store Bengali letters in their own encoding rather than in Unicode. Text from this page is Unicode, so pasted into a SutonnyMJ layout it turns into a jumble of the wrong characters. Run it through a Unicode to Bijoy converter first, or set that passage in a Unicode Bengali font instead. Avro Keyboard, for one, includes Unicode to ANSI and ANSI to Unicode converters.

The same mismatch works the other way. Text copied out of an old Bijoy document into an email or a web form shows up as Latin letters and symbols rather than Bengali, and needs converting from ANSI to Unicode before it will sit alongside dictated text.

Phonetic typing, fixed layouts and phone keyboards

Bangla typists tend to fall into two camps. Phonetic typists spell a word in Latin letters and let the software convert it, so amar becomes আমার; layout typists use a fixed keyboard such as Bijoy, Probhat or National (Jatiya), where each key is a Bengali letter. Either works for correcting a dictated draft. What each platform offers:

• Windows: the Bangla and Bangla - INSCRIPT layouts, plus Microsoft’s Bangla phonetic keyboard, one of its Indic Phonetic keyboards, added under Settings, Time & language, Language & region. Avro Keyboard, a free phonetic typing tool from OmicronLab first released in 2003, also offers fixed layouts such as Probhat and National (Jatiya).
• macOS: in System Settings, under Keyboard input sources, Apple lists Bangla (InScript), Bangla (QWERTY) and Bangla (Transliteration), the last of which converts Latin typing into Bengali script.
• Android: Gboard supports Bengali with a Latin transliteration layout, a native Bengali layout and handwriting input. Ridmik Keyboard, on Android and iOS, offers Avro Phonetic, Probhat and National layouts.
• iPhone and iPad: add the Bangla keyboard under Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards. On iOS 18 or later with an iPhone 12 or newer, you can instead add Bangla to the English (US) keyboard and type Bengali in Latin letters without switching keyboards.

Bengali dictation outside this page

Bengali is Bangladesh’s national language and, after Hindi, the most common mother tongue in India, yet neither Microsoft nor Apple includes it in their dictation features. The built-in options come from Google. At the time of writing:

• Google Docs voice typing (Tools, then Voice typing) lists both Bengali (Bangladesh) and Bengali (India). Google’s help page says voice commands only work in English and that punctuation may not be available in every language, so the dari is manual in Docs as well.
• Gboard on Android: Google added Bengali voice typing for Bangladesh and India in August 2017, and it works from the microphone key with Bengali selected. Gboard’s automatic punctuation, part of its newer advanced voice typing, is not offered for Bengali.
• Microsoft: Bengali is in neither Windows voice typing (Windows key + H) nor Dictate in Word and the other Microsoft 365 apps, where several other Indian languages are available or in preview.
• Apple dictation on iPhone, iPad and Mac: Bengali is not among Apple’s dictation languages, even though Apple’s keyboards cover Bangla.

Chalit, aspirates and three words for you

Four things about spoken Bengali that shape what comes back:

• Speak close to standard colloquial Bengali (চলিত ভাষা), the form used in newspapers, broadcasting and most writing in both countries. Strongly regional speech such as Sylheti or Chittagonian, which some linguists class as separate languages, can be transcribed poorly, and this tool has no option for either.
• Expect চলিত forms. Dictation writes down what you say, so natural speech gives you করেছি rather than the সাধু ভাষা form করিয়াছি; converting a formal document is still manual work.
• Do not swallow aspirated consonants when you speed up. ভ, ঘ, ধ and থ change meaning (ভাত is rice, বাত is rheumatism), and the recogniser only gets what the microphone hears.
• Keep one level of address. Bengali has three words for you, তুই, তুমি and আপনি, and each takes its own verb ending: তুই আসবি, তুমি আসবে, আপনি আসবেন (you will come). A misheard ending changes the tone of a message as well as its spelling, so read the verbs in anything addressed to someone senior.

Bangla in two countries

Bengali is the national language of Bangladesh and an official language of the Indian states of West Bengal and Tripura and of the Barak Valley in Assam. In the 2011 Census of India, 97,237,669 people reported Bengali as their mother tongue, 8.03 per cent of the population and second only to Hindi.

It is also the language behind International Mother Language Day. On 21 February 1952, students in Dhaka demonstrating for Bengali to be recognised as a state language were killed when police opened fire, and UNESCO later made the date a worldwide observance.