Pick the dictation language
Auto-detect or pin one of 15 languages. What the setting does depends on which engine you run: Whisper obeys it, Parakeet ignores it, Qwen3-ASR needs it.
Settings → Voice input → Language tells the speech engine what to expect. On Windows the row is labelled "Native language (you speak)". On Linux it is Settings → General → Language. The same setting also tells the filler remover which word list to use.
Auto-detect (default)
Auto-detect ships as the default and works with local models as well as cloud ones. Dimmy passes an explicit auto value to whisper.cpp rather than leaving the language blank. Leaving it blank used to return a confident, completely empty transcript with no error at all, which read as "slow" or "stuck" rather than broken. That is fixed.
Pinning the language you actually speak is still a little quicker and a little more reliable on short clips, because the engine has nothing to work out first.
The list
The picker offers Auto-detect plus 15 explicit languages, in two blocks. The first block is covered by both local engines. The second is marked (Whisper) because Parakeet TDT v3 does not cover it.
Auto-detect covers the rest of the 99 languages Whisper knows without listing them all in a dropdown.
What each engine does with it
Pin a language
- Open Settings → Voice input → Language.
- Pick a language from the dropdown.
- It saves on its own.
Filler removal
Filler removal has hand-tuned word lists in 6 languages: English, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese. Every other language still transcribes correctly, it just has no filler list yet. See Filler removal.
Meeting recaps detect their own language
This setting says "I speak Italian", not "this meeting was in Italian", and nobody changes it before a call with an English-speaking client. So a recap runs its own detection over the recording instead: five windows of 30 seconds, skipping the first 20 seconds, on recordings of at least a minute, and three of the five have to agree. If they do not, the recap keeps its existing wording rather than guessing.