Malayalam voice typing

Malayalam script, Manglish and English loanwords

With Malayalam (India) chosen in the language list, the browser's recogniser writes what you say in Malayalam script, the form a letter or a newspaper would use. It does not produce Manglish, the informal Malayalam in Latin letters that fills so many chat threads; if that is what you are after, run the finished text through a transliteration tool.

There is no upper and lower case in Malayalam script, so the sentence capitalisation this page applies to English has nothing to do here. Each phrase goes into the box exactly as the recogniser returns it.

Spoken Malayalam takes in English words and gives them Malayalam endings. In the sample, ട്രെയിൻ is train and സ്റ്റേഷനിൽ is station with -ഇൽ (at) added. The recogniser picks the spelling for words like these, and an English phrase dropped into Malayalam speech may be written in Malayalam letters, in Latin letters, or in a mixture of the two within one paragraph. Brand names, email addresses and technical terms are the ones to read twice.

Numbers in present-day Malayalam are written with 0 to 9, like English. The script's own digits (൧, ൨, ൩ …) belong to an older system that also had single signs for ten, a hundred and a thousand (൰, ൱, ൲) and for a quarter, a half and three quarters (൳, ൴, ൵). Unicode encodes all of them, but a reader today will not expect them in an email. The detail to watch is the spoken form: Malayalam fuses a number into one long word, ഇരുപത്തിയഞ്ച് for 25, and a spoken amount such as അഞ്ഞൂറ് രൂപ (500 rupees) can reach the box as words rather than digits, so check each time, price and phone number before you send it.

Where one word ends and the next begins is the recogniser's decision, not yours. Malayalam writers disagree about it too: വീട്ടിലെത്തും and വീട്ടിൽ എത്തും (will reach home) both appear in print, and വൈകിയാണ് in the sample fuses വൈകി (late) with ആണ് (is). A word break you would have placed differently is a matter of house style to adjust, not a mishearing.

Punctuation marks and their Malayalam names

The marks themselves are the ones English uses, and each has a Malayalam name, often two: the full stop is പൂർണവിരാമം or ബിന്ദു, the comma അല്പവിരാമം or അങ്കുശം, the question mark ചോദ്യചിഹ്നം or കാകു, and the exclamation mark ആശ്ചര്യചിഹ്നം. The danda (।) that closes a Hindi sentence belongs to older Malayalam texts and verse, so a Malayalam email or message has no use for it.

This page does not turn any of those names into its mark. Dictate the words, then go back through the box with the keyboard and put the punctuation in.

The question mark is the one most often forgotten. A yes-or-no question in Malayalam usually ends in a verb carrying -ഓ, as in വരുമോ (will you come?) or കഴിച്ചോ (did you eat?), and questions built on എന്ത് (what), എവിടെ (where) or എപ്പോൾ (when) need one as well. Scanning the transcript for verbs ending in ോ finds most of the first kind quickly.

Chillu letters, old script and new script

Two things can make dictated Malayalam look or behave differently once pasted elsewhere, and neither is a recognition error.

The first is the chillu letters, the pure consonants such as ൻ, ർ, ൽ, ൾ and ൺ that end so many Malayalam words: the sample above has ഞാൻ, മണിക്കൂർ and എത്തുമ്പോൾ. Since Unicode 5.1 each chillu has had its own character, and that is the recommended form. Older input tools built the same shape from a consonant, a chandrakkala and an invisible zero-width joiner. On screen the two are indistinguishable, yet they are different sequences of characters, so Find, sorting and duplicate checks can treat identical-looking words as different when dictated text meets older text.

The second is the choice between the traditional orthography, pazhaya lipi, with its many joined letters, and the reformed orthography, puthiya lipi, introduced in 1971, which writes vowel signs such as ു and ൂ as separate marks and splits rarer conjuncts with a visible chandrakkala. Both are stored as exactly the same characters. Which one you see depends on the font of the app you paste into, so if a passage that looked modern here shows up with old-style conjuncts in a document, changing the font changes the look without touching the text.

Keyboards for correcting Malayalam by hand

Some words will always need fixing, and typing those is quicker than dictating them again. Malayalam input is built into every major system, and each offers a phonetic option that turns typing in Latin letters into Malayalam script.

• Windows 10 and 11: add Malayalam under Time & language in Settings. Windows includes a Malayalam InScript keyboard, the official Indian standard layout, and the May 2019 update added a Malayalam phonetic keyboard that converts what you type in Latin letters as you go.
• Mac: add Malayalam as an input source in System Settings, under Keyboard, then Text Input and Edit. The three Malayalam layouts are InScript, QWERTY and Transliteration, and Transliteration is the phonetic one.
• iPhone and iPad: go to Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard and choose Malayalam, which comes in Alphabetic, InScript and Transliteration layouts. Malayalam is not among the languages in Apple's multilingual keyboard that mixes several Indian languages on one English layout, so switch to it with the globe key.
• Android: Gboard offers Malayalam both as a Malayalam-script layout and as a phonetic layout where you spell words in Latin letters and pick the Malayalam suggestion above the keys.
• Swanalekha, a free and open-source Malayalam input method from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing (SMC), runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iPhone and iPad. Type amma and it writes അമ്മ; if the last letter is not the one you meant, press Tab to cycle through the alternatives.

Dictating Malayalam outside this page

The operating systems' own dictation tools leave Malayalam out, while Google's keyboard and Google Docs include it. As things stood in September 2026:

• Google Docs on a computer: Malayalam is one of the languages in the voice typing box, which you open from the Tools menu in Chrome, Edge or Safari. Docs only accepts spoken commands when both your Google account and the document are set to English, so a Malayalam document gets its full stops from the keyboard there as well.
• Android: Gboard has taken Malayalam through its microphone key since August 2017, in WhatsApp, Messages or any other app where it is the keyboard. Like this page, it writes Malayalam script, so it is no shortcut to Manglish either.
• Apple devices: Apple's Dictation, on the iPhone, iPad and Mac alike, offers Hindi but not Malayalam, even though Apple lists Malayalam as an iOS system language and ships Malayalam keyboards. On a Mac, this page in Chrome or Edge fills the gap.
• Windows: Microsoft's voice typing (Windows key + H) covers several Indian languages, Hindi and Tamil among them, but not Malayalam. On a Windows PC, a Chromium browser with this page is the way to dictate it.

What trips up the Malayalam recogniser

Most corrections in dictated Malayalam come from three things: long joined words, doubled consonants and letter pairs that blur at speed.

• Say a joined word in one breath. വീട്ടിലെത്തും (will reach home) is വീട്ടിൽ plus എത്തും, and stopping halfway through can leave it split or misheard.
• Give doubled consonants their full length. പട്ടി (dog) and പടി (step) differ only in the doubled ട്ട, and rushing it can be enough to swap one word for the other.
• Proofread the letter pairs that run together in quick speech: ന and ണ, ല and ള (as in മലയാളം), ര and റ, and ഴ, the zh sound in മഴ (rain) in the sample. A wrong pick is a different word, and a spell checker will not always flag it.
• Heavy monsoon rain on the roof is steady, broad noise that masks the quieter consonants. A headset microphone close to your mouth copes with it better than a laptop's built-in microphone.

Malayalam in Kerala, Lakshadweep and Mahé

Kerala's official language is Malayalam, and it also has official status in Lakshadweep and in the Mahé district of Puducherry. Census of India figures for 2011 put the number of people with Malayalam as their first language at 34,838,819, about 2.9 per cent of the country's population, the great majority of them in Kerala. It is a Dravidian language closely related to Tamil, and it has held classical-language status from the Government of India since 2013. Its script, also called Malayalam, developed from the Grantha and Vatteluttu scripts and is written left to right.