Why only English and German? When will more languages come?
VoicePad currently supports **only English and German** for dictation. This is a deliberate choice — and yes, more languages are on the roadmap. Here's the honest explanation.
**Why the limit is real:**
Whisper itself supports 100+ languages. The model is multilingual out of the box. So why does VoicePad only enable English and German?
Three reasons:
**1. Hallucination filter coverage.** VoicePad ships with a per-language filter that blocks Whisper's silence-triggered garbage phrases. English has 55+ exact phrases and 36+ prefix patterns blocked. German has a parallel blacklist. **Without language-specific filters, recording silence produces garbage like "Thanks for watching!" or "Please subscribe to my channel."** Building each filter requires real-device testing with silence and ambient noise — that's weeks of work per language.
**2. Custom dictionary curation.** Each supported language has hundreds of corrections for common Whisper mistakes — German city names (München, Köln), English tech terms (API, GraphQL), name capitalizations. A new language needs the same curation effort.
**3. Real-world testing.** Both Alex and the early founding members are German-English bilingual. Every dictation we ship has been tested by native speakers of these languages. We won't ship Spanish "support" that we can't test ourselves.
**Languages we're considering:**
The roadmap has explicit entries for:
- 🇫🇷 **French**
- 🇪🇸 **Spanish**
- 🇮🇹 **Italian**
These three are highest priority because:
- Large user bases
- Many requests via Reddit and email
- Alex has friends/contacts who are native speakers and willing to test
**Languages we're NOT prioritizing:**
- Romanian (Alex's native language) — small user base, would be hard to justify
- Polish, Dutch, Scandinavian — possible but later
- Asian languages (Mandarin, Japanese, Korean) — technically possible but requires different testing approach
**Why not "just enable them"?**
Whisper can technically transcribe any of these. We could flip a switch and call it "Spanish support." But you'd hit hallucinated phrases in long pauses, mistakes on common words, no custom dictionary for technical terms. That's not "support" — that's exposing users to bugs.
**When will French/Spanish/Italian ship?**
Track status on the public roadmap. Each one is a 1-2 month project once we commit to it.
**If you want a specific language:**
[Submit a request on the public roadmap](https://voicepad-tech.productlift.dev/t/feedback) and vote on existing requests. The most-voted languages move higher in priority.
**The TL;DR:**
EN+DE today. FR+ES+IT next (specific timing TBD). Other languages possible if there's clear demand. Honesty over feature inflation.