Free Hindi & Hinglish Voice Typing on Windows (Offline)

Most dictation tools handle English well but fall apart the moment you speak the way many Indians actually talk — Hinglish, a natural mix of Hindi and English in one sentence. Cloud tools also raise privacy concerns and often cost money. Sotto is a free, open-source dictation app that runs OpenAI Whisper locally on your Windows PC and handles English, Hindi (Devanagari), and Hinglish — with your audio never leaving your machine.

What it can do

• Hindi in Devanagari: speak Hindi and get proper देवनागरी text.
• Hinglish: mix Hindi and English naturally in a single sentence.
• Type anywhere: WhatsApp Web, Word, browser, chat, email, code editors.
• Offline & free: no account, no subscription, no cloud upload.

Set it up in a few minutes

1. Download & unzip the free release from GitHub Releases.
2. Run Sotto.exe (on the SmartScreen warning: More info → Run anyway).
3. Download the multilingual model once from Settings (~300 MB). This is the only network request.
4. Choose your language mode (see below), then hold Ctrl + Win, speak, and release.

Full walkthrough: How to get offline voice-to-text on Windows.

Getting the best Hindi / Hinglish accuracy

• Use the multilingual model (not an English-only .en model). Sotto ships with a multilingual Whisper model by default.
• Pick the right language mode in Settings:
  • Hindi — best when you're speaking mostly Hindi; keeps output in Devanagari and avoids the common "Hindi mistaken for Urdu" problem.
  • English — lock this when you're speaking English and don't want stray detection.
  • Auto — lets Whisper detect per phrase; great for true Hinglish, with Sotto's built-in correction to keep Hindi from being misread as related scripts.
• Speak in phrases, not single words — context dramatically improves accuracy for mixed-language speech.
• Reduce background noise. Sotto's voice-activity gate ignores static so it won't hallucinate random words during silence.

Why Sotto handles Indian speech better

Sotto is specifically tuned for this: it detects the spoken language per phrase, keeps genuine Hindi in Devanagari, corrects cases where Hindi is misdetected as a related right-to-left script, and drops noise instead of inventing foreign-language text. It's the kind of robustness that generic English dictation tools — and even some cloud services — don't offer for Hinglish.

Is it really free and private?

Yes — MIT-licensed and open source. Everything runs on your CPU; no GPU needed and no audio ever leaves your PC. Read the code on GitHub.

Related guides

• How to get offline voice-to-text on Windows (no cloud)
• Best open-source Wispr Flow alternatives for Windows