Free Marathi voice typing in your browser

Marathi (India) or Hindi: check the menu first

Behind the menu label, Marathi (India) is the language tag mr-IN, and that tag is what the page passes to the browser’s speech recogniser along with your microphone. The setting to be wary of is Hindi (India), in the same menu. It is an easy pick to make by habit, since Hindi is the better-known Devanagari option, and the result is not obviously wrong: the text is in the right script, so it looks plausible at a glance. Read it, though, and it is garbled near-Hindi, because a recogniser told to expect Hindi matches your speech against Hindi words and grammar. If a transcript reads like neither language, look at the menu before you blame the microphone.

The Devanagari that comes back is written the Marathi way, the style known as Balbodh. Three things mark it out from Hindi text: the letter ळ, which standard Hindi does not use, in everyday words such as सकाळी, वेळ and शाळा; the eyelash form of र, as in दुसऱ्या; and the letters ॲ and ऑ, which Marathi uses for the vowels of English loans such as ॲप (app) and ऑफिस (office).

Marathi speech borrows freely from English (लोकल, मोबाईल, बिल), and inside a Marathi sentence the recogniser sometimes hands such a loan back in Roman script instead. A Marathi message usually wants लोकल, not local, so convert any stray Roman-script word by hand. Numbers deserve the same attention. Marathi has its own digits, ० to ९, in use alongside 0 to 9, and a spoken number can come back as either kind of digit or as a word: दहा rather than 10, or साडेसात rather than 7.30. Phone numbers, times and rupee amounts are the places to reread.

पूर्णविराम means a dot: punctuating Marathi

Marathi and Hindi share a script but not a full stop. Hindi ends a sentence with the danda (।); standard Marathi uses the Latin dot (.), and Marathi grammar calls it पूर्णविराम. The rest of the set is the English one under Marathi names: स्वल्पविराम for the comma, अर्धविराम for the semicolon, अपूर्णविराम for the colon, प्रश्नचिन्ह for the question mark and उद्गारवाचक चिन्ह for the exclamation mark. Even where the marks match, the names do not: in Hindi the comma is अल्प विराम and the colon उप विराम.

The dot is a nineteenth-century arrival. Marathi was written without punctuation marks until the mid-1800s, and Thomas Candy, an English educator who completed Molesworth’s English–Marathi dictionary, is credited with introducing them; his manual, विरामचिन्हांची परिभाषा, spread the practice among Marathi writers. The danda survives in devotional verse, where a line of an abhang pauses on । and a stanza closes on ॥, but an email, a chat message or a form in Marathi ends its sentences with a dot. Text copied from a Hindi document will need its dandas swapped for dots.

Nothing on this page turns spoken Marathi punctuation into marks. पूर्णविराम and स्वल्पविराम are not commands here; if the recogniser writes them down at all, you get the word, not the dot or the comma. (Windows voice typing, covered further down, is the tool that does act on them.) What works instead is a rhythm: one sentence, a short pause, then the next. The recogniser tends to close off a phrase when you pause, each closed phrase lands in the box after a space, and those joins show you where each पूर्णविराम belongs when you add them afterwards.

Four checks before you send dictated Marathi

Run these on any Marathi transcript before it goes anywhere.

• Joined postpositions. Standard Marathi spelling writes मध्ये, साठी, मुळे, पर्यंत and their like onto the word before them: ऑफिसमध्ये, तुझ्यासाठी, पावसामुळे, वाजेपर्यंत. Hindi keeps its equivalents apart (ऑफिस में). A postposition that has come back as a separate word needs joining.
• ल and ळ. काल means yesterday and काळ means time or an era; वेल is a creeper and वेळ is time. The recogniser leans on context to choose, so check these pairs wherever the sentence could go either way.
• Look-alike characters. ॲ and ऑ can each be stored as one character or as अ followed by a separate vowel sign, and the eyelash र also has two encodings. Unicode says to use the single characters, but not every keyboard does, and the two versions are different text to a computer: a search for ऑफिस can miss an ऑफिस typed elsewhere. When find-and-replace misses a word that is visibly on screen, the two copies are probably encoded differently; retype one so they match.
• Letter shapes. Marathi prefers its own shapes for ल, श and झ and for the digits ५, ८ and ९. They are the same Unicode characters Hindi uses, and the font decides which shape you see, so Hindi-style shapes in the box do not mean the text is wrong.

Keyboards for fixing Marathi by hand

For a single wrong ळ or a misheard suffix, typing beats dictating the sentence again. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android all ship Marathi input, in two styles: phonetic, where you spell the sound in Latin letters (namaskar) and pick नमस्कार from the suggestions, and InScript, the standard Indian layout with a key for each Devanagari letter.

• Windows 11: under Settings, Time & language, Language & region, add Marathi. Its keyboard options include the traditional InScript layout and a Marathi phonetic keyboard, one of the set Microsoft calls Indic Phonetic keyboards.
• Mac: in System Settings, open Keyboard and then the Text Input Edit button to add Marathi. There are three Marathi input sources: Transliteration, QWERTY and InScript.
• iPhone and iPad: pick Marathi under Add New Keyboard (in Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards), and then a layout: Alphabetic, InScript or Transliteration.
• Android: Gboard lists three Marathi options, Marathi Devanagari, Marathi Latin and Marathi Transliteration; with the Transliteration one, what you spell in Roman letters is converted to Devanagari as you go. Microsoft SwiftKey supports Marathi transliteration as well.

Marathi dictation in Google, Microsoft and Apple tools

Support is uneven, and most of the difference is in punctuation. From each company’s own help pages, as they read in September 2026:

• Google Docs: open Tools and choose Voice typing (Google supports Chrome, Edge and Safari for this), and Marathi is in the language menu of the microphone box. Google’s help notes that the browser, not Docs, runs the speech-to-text, and it does not promise spoken punctuation, which uses English words such as “period” and “comma”, for every language. Plan on typing Marathi full stops yourself there as well.
• Gboard on Android: add a Marathi layout, then tap the microphone. If you have several languages enabled, Google’s help says the abbreviation shown at the bottom left of the toolbar changes which one it listens for. Google’s help warns that talk-to-text does not cover every language and that its spoken punctuation phrases may not either.
• Windows 11 voice typing, which the Windows key plus H starts: Marathi is on Microsoft’s supported list and has its own table of spoken punctuation. पूर्णविराम or फुल स्टॉप types a full stop, स्वल्पविराम a comma, अपूर्णविराम a colon, प्रश्न चिन्ह a question mark, and नवीन ओळ or नवीन परिच्छेद a line break. Microsoft’s Hindi table maps पूर्ण विराम to the danda instead, the same Marathi–Hindi split described above. Voice typing needs an internet connection.
• Apple Dictation: not available for Marathi. The only Indian entries on Apple’s dictation list are Hindi (India) and English (India), so on an iPhone, iPad or Mac you type Marathi on one of the keyboards above; on a Mac, dictating Marathi means a browser, either this page in Chrome or Google Docs.

Speaking so there is less to fix

Habits that cut down the proofreading:

• Dialect. If you speak Varhadi, Zadi Boli or another regional variety at home, words that belong only to that dialect may come back as the nearest standard Marathi word, or not at all. For text that will be read in standard Marathi (प्रमाण मराठी) anyway, leaning towards the standard form while dictating saves corrections; for a message to family in your own dialect, expect more hand-editing.
• Suffixes. Marathi grammar lives in word endings, so a swallowed ending changes the meaning: मी आलो is I came (said by a man), तो आला is he came. Finish each word, and keep ळ distinct from ल.
• Pace. Speak whole sentences at conversational speed, and say long suffixed words such as ऑफिसमध्ये in one go rather than syllable by syllable.
• English passages. For a whole sentence or paragraph in English, pause, switch the menu to English (India), dictate it, then switch back to Marathi (India).
• Names. Town, street and family names are easy for any recogniser to get wrong. In a message full of them, dictate the sentence and type the names.

Marathi from Maharashtra to Thanjavur

Marathi is the official language of Maharashtra and an additional official language of Goa, and it is spoken across the state borders in parts of Karnataka, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. A Marathi-speaking community has lived around Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu since Maratha rule there began in the seventeenth century, and there are Marathi speakers abroad. The 2011 Census of India recorded about 83 million people naming Marathi as their mother tongue, the third-largest figure after Hindi and Bengali, and in October 2024 the Union government granted Marathi classical-language status. Modi, a cursive script, was used for Marathi administrative records until about 1950; printed Marathi and its literature have long used Devanagari.