The word "dictation" means two unrelated things on the internet. This page exists to be clear about which one this site is.
Not speech-to-text. Not voice typing, not transcription software, not a tool that turns your voice into a document. Your microphone stays off the entire time. If you searched for software that types while you talk, this is the wrong site — and we'd rather tell you in the first paragraph than after a download.
The school exercise. Dictation as your strictest teacher ran it: a native speaker says a sentence, you write down what you heard, and your errors are marked — here by a machine, character by character, instantly and in private. Then spaced repetition brings back what you missed, at the interval your brain needs to consolidate it.
The raw material is the same corpus infrastructure that trained the world's speech recognition: enormous collections of real sentences, spoken by real people, verified against their transcripts. Machines learned to hear from this data. So can you — we point the same human-spoken material at the human side of the loop, at massive scale: over a million recorded sentences across 28 languages.
Listening is the skill that gates conversation, and it cannot be faked or looked up in the moment. Dictation tests exactly what arrived at your ear — no multiple choice to guess through, no context to lean on. It is deliberately hard, and the difficulty is the point: real audio from real speakers, graded honestly, repeated until your ear catches what it used to miss.
Available in Spanish, French, German, English, Arabic, Chinese, Romanian, and 21 more languages — in the browser, on iPhone and Android as Open Dictation, and as an offline desktop app. Committed learners can read about the replication experiment.