Skip to content
HeidiHeidi

What a computer can do with Swiss German

And what it cannot. This page collects what has actually been measured in the field — with the numbers and the sources, so you can check our claims against them.

Why it is hard

There is no official spelling. There are recommendations from 1938 that dialectology uses — but even trained transcribers apply them differently, and almost nobody writes that way to a friend.

Dialect is spoken; the standard is written. So writing down what was said is not transcription here, it is translation — and that is how nearly every system that exists is built.

And it is a small language in the sense that matters for data: the largest public collections are a few hundred hours, and almost all of them are licensed for research only.

Where the data comes from

The public collections this field rests on. The direction column is the one to read: it shows that almost everything hears dialect and writes the standard.

Understanding

Word error rate on the same test set, so the numbers can be compared. All of these produce Standard German — the figure says how well it translated, not how well it wrote dialect.

Speaking

Here the marketplace misleads. What is sold as a Swiss German voice is usually Swiss Standard German — the written language, read aloud. Real dialect synthesis exists almost only in research.

Language models

Whether a model really handles dialect, or whether that is only in the press release. Evaluated means somebody measured it and published the result.

What this means for Heidi

  • Dictation does not write dialect down. It writes what you want to say, in the language you already have — which is exactly what the research can do.

  • Heidi does not speak. A voice that pronounced Zurich German wrongly is something you could not check, and that is the one mistake this product must not make.

  • The dialect check runs without a model. It is a fixed list of rules, not a language model, which is why it cannot start inventing things.

Sources