Gujarati voice typing

Gujarati, and a Nagari script without the headline

Gujarati is Gujarat’s official language and one of the official languages of the union territory of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu. India’s 2011 Census counted 55,492,554 people who named it as their mother tongue, 4.6 per cent of the country and sixth among its languages. Beyond Gujarat there are large communities in Mumbai and the rest of Maharashtra, and abroad in the United Kingdom, North America and East Africa.

Its script is a sister of Devanagari from the same Nagari tradition, most easily told apart by the missing shirorekha, the line that runs along the top of Hindi and Marathi words. Look closely and several vowel letters are visibly built on અ: આ, એ and ઓ are અ with a vowel sign attached. Unicode nevertheless stores each of them as a single character, and that single character is what arrives in the box. The distinction only bites when you correct by hand: type the vowel’s own key rather than અ followed by a sign, because the two-part version looks identical and a search for the word will not find it. Gujarati has no capital letters, so a finished sentence needs nothing more than its closing mark.

What gu-IN writes when you mix in English

The dropdown starts on Gujarati (India), tag gu-IN, the only Gujarati entry it has, so a speaker in Leicester, Toronto or Nairobi uses the same setting as one in Ahmedabad or Surat. Your browser passes the audio to its speech service for recognition, Google’s servers in the case of Chrome, and dictation stops if the connection drops.

Plenty of English finds its way into spoken Gujarati: office, doctor, bank, ticket. Gujarati spelling has a device for such words, the crescent-topped vowels ઍ and ઑ, which stand for the vowels of bank and office, but writers do not use it consistently, and ઑફિસ and ઓફિસ, ડૉક્ટર and ડોક્ટર all turn up in print. The spelling the recogniser settles on need not match the one your office or newspaper prefers, so pick one and bring the rest into line. Brand names, email addresses and anything else that must stay in Latin letters are quicker typed than spoken; for a whole sentence of English, change the language to English (India) and back again afterwards, and the text you already have is kept.

The full stop took over from the vertical bar

Older Gujarati writing closed a sentence with a vertical bar, as Hindi still does with its danda (।). Contemporary Gujarati replaced it with the full stop, and uses the comma, question mark and exclamation mark exactly as English does, under Gujarati names such as પૂર્ણવિરામ for the full stop and અલ્પવિરામ for the comma. Direct speech is put in quotation marks less often than in English, too. So if you paste in text from a Hindi source, or type । from habit, swap those dandas for full stops.

On this page every mark is typed. The checkbox for spoken commands greys out once Gujarati is chosen, since its trigger words are English and a Gujarati transcript never contains them, and a spoken પૂર્ણવિરામ is not turned into a mark. Nor should you expect the recogniser to insert marks for you. Work a paragraph at a time: speak it, press Stop dictating, and punctuate as you read it back. Gujarati usually puts the verb last, which makes sentence ends easy to find: each full stop goes straight after a closing verb such as છે, હતું or દઈશું.

Gujarati digits, and two that pass for letters

Gujarati writes numbers with its own digits, ૦ ૧ ૨ ૩ ૪ ૫ ૬ ૭ ૮ ૯, and with 0 to 9 as well. The same spoken five can come back as ૫, as 5 or as the word પાંચ, and the recogniser need not make the same choice twice in one paragraph. This page has no setting to force either system, so standardise the figures yourself before anything official leaves the box.

Take care when you retype them. The Gujarati two, ૨, is almost indistinguishable from the letter ર (ra), and five, ૫, from પ (pa); Unicode’s own list of confusable characters pairs them. A phone number with a ર in it looks right on screen, but a dialler, a spreadsheet or a payment form will not read that letter as a number. When a figure matters, type it with Western digits from an English layout, or check each Gujarati one.

Keyboards for correcting dictated Gujarati

Corrections need a Gujarati keyboard, and every platform offers two kinds. InScript, drawn up as a national standard for Indian scripts, gives each key a Gujarati letter and keeps the same sounds on the same keys in every script it covers, so anyone who types Hindi on InScript is at home straight away. With phonetic, or transliteration, input you spell a word in English letters and choose from the Gujarati spellings it suggests. On either, a conjunct such as ક્ષ or સ્ત is built with the virama (્), the small stroke Gujarati speakers informally call khodo, meaning lame.

• Windows: once Gujarati is added as a language under Time & language in Settings, it comes with the Gujarati INSCRIPT layout, and Gujarati Phonetic is one more keyboard in the language options. The taskbar indicator reads ગુજ instead of ENG while either is active. Microsoft’s worked example is બગીચો (garden): bagicho and Enter on the phonetic keyboard, or the keys y, i, r, ; and e on INSCRIPT.
• Mac: the three Gujarati input sources Apple lists are InScript, QWERTY and Transliteration. Add them in System Settings, under Keyboard and then Text Input.
• iPhone and iPad: Apple lists Gujarati Alphabetic, InScript and Transliteration keyboards, added from Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards.
• Android: Gboard gives Gujarati two layouts, one with Gujarati letters on the keys and one where you type Latin letters and get Gujarati back.

Beyond this page: Windows, Docs, Gboard, Word and Apple

Gujarati is better served than several of its neighbours, because Windows voice typing covers it, as it does not Kannada, Malayalam or Bengali. Apple is the gap. Checked against each vendor’s own help pages in September 2026:

• Windows 11 voice typing, opened with the Windows key and H: Gujarati is supported, and Microsoft publishes Gujarati commands for it that accept either the Gujarati term or the English word said in Gujarati, such as પૂર્ણ વિરામ or ફુલ સ્ટોપ for a full stop, પ્રશ્નાર્થ ચિન્હ or ક્વેશ્ચન માર્ક for a question mark, નવો પરિચ્છેદ or ન્યૂ લાઇન for a new line, and તેને હટાવો to delete. It only works while you are online.
• Google Docs: Gujarati is one of the voice typing languages under Tools, and Docs voice typing runs in Chrome, Edge or Safari. Google keeps its voice commands for English and warns that punctuation may not work in every language, so plan to punctuate there as well.
• Gboard on Android: Gujarati voice typing arrived in 2017 and works from the microphone key. Google’s help page names six languages for the automatic punctuation of advanced voice typing, a feature of Pixel phones from the 6 onwards, and Gujarati is not among them.
• Dictate in Word for Microsoft 365: Gujarati (India) is a preview language there, which Microsoft warns can mean lower accuracy or limited punctuation, and dictation is for Microsoft 365 subscribers only.
• Apple: Gujarati is missing from the Dictation list for iPhone, iPad and Mac, where Hindi and Indian English are the only Indian entries. Apple does list Gujarati for VoiceOver and Read & Speak, so its devices can read Gujarati text aloud, which is a useful way to proofread, but they cannot take Gujarati speech down.

Accents, breathy sounds and short or long ઇ

Six habits aimed at the way Gujarati sounds and is spelt:

• Lean towards the Gujarati of a formal letter or a news bulletin. A general-purpose recogniser handles the standard language best, so Kathiawadi, Surati or Charotari words that rarely reach print are the likeliest to come back wrong.
• Kutchi is its own language, related to Sindhi, although it is usually written in Gujarati script. The gu-IN recogniser listens only for Gujarati and tends to squeeze Kutchi speech into the nearest Gujarati words, so dictate in Gujarati or type Kutchi by hand.
• Check the h you barely say. In relaxed speech the હ in words such as હવે (now) and સહેલું (easy) becomes a breathy quality on the vowel rather than a clear h, but the spelling keeps the letter. Look at words like these first, and say them a touch more carefully if one keeps coming back wrong.
• Keep plain and breathy consonants apart: બાર is twelve and ભાર is weight. That breathiness is quiet, and a distant laptop microphone or a ceiling fan on full speed can swallow it, so dictate with the microphone close and the fan off.
• Proofread ઇ against ઈ, and ઉ against ઊ. Spoken Gujarati no longer gives these vowels different lengths, so the spelling is something the recogniser has to know rather than hear. Gujarat Vidyapith’s Sarth Gujarati Jodanikosh has been the reference for standard spelling since 1929, yet everyday writing still wavers, and the recogniser’s choice may differ from the one your school or office expects.
• Say the whole sentence before pausing. The verb comes last and carries person and politeness, as in આવજે to a friend and આવજો to an elder or a group, so a sentence cut off before its verb leaves the recogniser less to go on.

Terafont, LMG Arun and other pre-Unicode files

Dictated text is Unicode Gujarati, the same encoding WhatsApp, Gmail and Word use, and the one behind Shruti, the Gujarati font Windows has shipped since XP, so in any of those it simply works. Older layouts are another story. Plenty of print work and office templates were set in legacy fonts such as LMG Arun and Terafont Varun, which draw Gujarati letters over the codes of Latin characters. Paste Unicode into one of those files and you see boxes or the wrong letters; copy text out of one into a modern app and it turns into Latin gibberish. The lasting fix is to run the old document through a legacy-to-Unicode converter and set it in Shruti or Noto Sans Gujarati. For a single paste into a Terafont file, convert the dictated passage the other way first.