Taglish dictation on a Mac
Examples measured 10 August 2026.
Most dictation tools do not handle two languages in one sentence badly. They do not handle it at all.
The problem is the middle of the sentence, not the language
Dictation software asks you to pick a language. That works if you speak one. If you are Filipino, or Singaporean, or Indian, or speak Spanish at home and English at work, the unit that carries your meaning is not a language — it is a sentence with two of them inside it:
Na-deploy ko na yung latest build sa staging kanina.
Pick English and the recogniser tries to fit Filipino sounds to English words. Pick Filipino and it does the reverse to build and staging. There is no third setting, because the mixing happens mid-sentence and a language setting is chosen before you speak.
The hardest part is a word that is both
Words like na-deploy, i-review, pakicheck and mag-Friday are an English root under a Filipino affix. They are not slang and they are not a mistake — that construction is how the grammar borrows a verb, and it is completely ordinary in professional Filipino writing.
They are also the exact point where a recogniser with no Filipino gives itself away. It either drops the affix, or it invents a word that sounds close and means nothing. A tool can look fluent on your English and still be unusable, because everything holding your sentence together is gone.
What that looks like in practice
Six of the thirty recordings, chosen to cover the different ways people write at work. This is what the multilingual speech model produced, before the cleanup pass runs.
| What was said | What Bunso heard |
|---|---|
| Na-deploy ko na yung latest build sa staging kanina. | Na-deploy ko na yung latest build sa staging kanina. |
| Kailangan natin i-refactor yung authentication middleware bago mag-Friday. | Kailangan natin i-refactor yung authentication ng middleware bago mag-Friday. |
| Send mo na yung invoice kay Ma'am Divina, tapos i-cc mo si accounting. | Send mo na yung invoice kay Ma'am Divina tapos isi-same mo si accounting. |
| Set natin yung call sa Monday para ma-discuss yung budget. | Set natin yung call sa Monday para ma-discuss yung budget. |
| Bakit ang init ngayon? Parang wala yung aircon sa office. | Bakit ang init ngayon parang wala yung aircon sa office? |
| Nag-crash yung app pag nag-open ka ng settings tapos nag-rotate ka ng screen. | Nag-crash yung app pag nag-open ka ng settings tapos nag-rotate ka ng screen. |
Read the third row closely, because it is a failure and it is ours:
i-cc came back as isi-same. Two letters spoken as
letters, inside a Filipino affix, is genuinely hard and we did not get it. The
full thirty, with the built-in macOS dictation alongside for comparison, are on
the head-to-head page — every clip, including
the ones we lost.
Hyphens are the residual problem, and they are fixable
Once the speech model actually knows the language, most of what is left is
not recognition at all — it is spelling convention. The model hears
ma-save correctly and writes masave; it hears
i-share and writes ishare. The word is right and the
hyphen is missing.
That is a rule, not a model problem, and Bunso applies one: it splits known Filipino affixes off English roots. The words in your custom dictionary are the list it splits against, which is why adding your own vocabulary helps here even though the dictionary's more obvious job is to prime the recogniser.
Being honest about the limits
- Thirty clips, one speaker. Enough to show a large difference, not enough to call a benchmark. Your register, your accent and your English-to-Filipino ratio will all differ from the person who recorded these.
- Taglish needs the multilingual model, which is the larger download and the slower of the two. If you dictate only English, the default model is faster and this page is not about your case.
- It is not perfect on Taglish. It drops a hyphen or a question mark, and it misses a word now and then. What it does not do is lose your sentence.
- Filipino is the language we have measured. The approach — a multilingual model plus affix rules plus your own vocabulary — is not Filipino-specific, but Singlish, Hinglish and Spanglish have not been tested here and we are not going to claim them until they have been.
What the app does with the text once it has heard it, or the full thirty against macOS dictation.