Whisper drops half of code-switched sentences — one fix: send 3 languages to the API

Aggravating_Site381 · reddit · 2026-09-11

A Reddit user who mixes English, Russian, German and Kazakh found every local Whisper dictation tool fails on code-switching: Whisper picks one language per utterance and the other language gets translated or vanishes.

Key experiment: sending a languages list to the OpenAI API — no list or two languages still drops the English half, but ["en","ru","de"] returns both correctly (the author can't explain why three is the threshold). Local workarounds split audio at pauses and detect per segment, which fixes the switch but loses context, degrading punctuation and rare words.

The author built VoiceType, an MIT-licensed Windows dictation app (hold Ctrl+Alt, talk, text lands in your window), local by default with optional API, built on RealtimeSTT, with no stray console window.

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