Most voice dictation apps treat Ukrainian as one of "100+ supported languages" — which usually means it kind of works, with persistent quirks: lost apostrophes, English words inserted mid-sentence, LLM cleanup that translates Ukrainian into Russian "thinking it's fixing it." Hovor doesn't train its own speech models — but we pick the strongest open ones for European languages and engineer the surrounding pipeline (prompts, dictionary, UI) so Ukrainian quality stops being an afterthought.
Speech-to-text models are trained on whatever audio data their creators can collect. For English, that's hundreds of thousands of hours from podcasts, YouTube, books, conversations. For Ukrainian, the data pool is dramatically smaller — and historically, Ukrainian audio was often misclassified as Russian by older datasets, which polluted the training corpus.
The result: most cloud STT services support Ukrainian on paper, but the quality lags 1–2 generations behind English. Common failure modes:
To be upfront about credit: Hovor doesn't train any of the speech or language models it ships. Parakeet v3 is NVIDIA's work, released under CC-BY-4.0. Whisper is OpenAI's. EuroLLM (used for on-device cleanup on Mac) is Unbabel's. What Hovor does is select the strongest open models for European languages, then engineer the surrounding pipeline so they actually work well for Ukrainian users.
Parakeet v3 (NVIDIA, 0.6B parameters) was trained on 24 European languages with explicit balancing across them. Ukrainian audio gets the same training attention as German or French — that's NVIDIA's engineering decision, not ours, but it's the reason we chose this model as Hovor's default. On the FLEURS benchmark, Parakeet v3 achieves 12.0% WER for Ukrainian (compared to Whisper Large V3's 12.6%, while being 4× smaller and 4–10× faster).
More important than benchmarks: in real Ukrainian dictation, Parakeet preserves apostrophes (м'ясо, об'єкт), keeps soft signs (день, тінь), and follows Ukrainian capitalization rules rather than English ones. We didn't engineer that behaviour — NVIDIA did, by training on properly labeled Ukrainian data — but we did the work of evaluating which open model handles those quirks best.
When Hovor uses an LLM for the cleanup pass (gpt-4o-mini on the server, EuroLLM on Mac, Apple Foundation Models on iOS 26+, or your own BYOK provider), the system prompt explicitly instructs the model to preserve the source language and never translate unless translation is the explicit user request. This single guard removes the most common Ukrainian failure mode — gpt-4o-mini deciding to "translate" a Ukrainian phrase into Russian or English mid-cleanup.
The prompt also calls out Ukrainian-specific rules: keep apostrophes, follow Ukrainian capitalization, preserve regional variants, don't substitute Russian-derived alternatives. This is engineering work we did ourselves, in hovor-server/prompt.go, and we keep refining it as failure cases come in.
Voice models routinely mishear personal names, place names, and technical terms. Hovor's custom dictionary lets you map variant transcriptions to the canonical form: Кирило|Кирилл|Cyril → Кирило, Київ|Киев → Київ, Львів|Львов → Львів. The dictionary is shared with the LLM cleanup stage as a hint, so the model learns your preferences mid-session.
The Hovor app interface is professionally translated into Ukrainian. Onboarding, settings, error messages, support pages — all native UA copy, not machine-translated. Same for the cabinet on hovor.app and the system templates.
The developer (Kyrylo, based in Kyiv) handles support directly. Ukrainian users get responses in Ukrainian, usually within 24 hours. No outsourced offshore support team that doesn't understand the linguistic context.
Hovor — це додаток для голосового вводу для iPhone та Mac, побудований навколо української мови як основної. На відміну від Wispr Flow або Superwhisper, де українська — один із багатьох "підтримуваних" мов, в Hovor українська — це основна мова дизайну. (Клієнт для Windows зараз переписується — скоро.)
Транскрипція може відбуватися на пристрої через Parakeet v3 (NVIDIA, 0.6B параметрів) — це означає що ваш голос не покидає телефон. Диктовка на пристрої має власну безкоштовну тижневу квоту, а з одноразовим Local Unlock стає необмеженою.
Системна клавіатура iOS працює в усіх додатках — Messages, Notes, Telegram, Slack, банківські застосунки. Натискаєте мікрофон, говорите, отримуєте чистий текст у тому полі де писали.
Безкоштовний тариф достатній для більшості користувачів. Pro коштує $11.99/міс або $89.99/рік.
Because Hovor uses Parakeet v3 (24 languages) plus Whisper Large V3 Turbo (extended language coverage) as fallback, and EuroLLM/Apple Foundation Models for cleanup, the practical language matrix looks like this:
The Russian/Belarusian exclusion is intentional in Parakeet v3's training — and it happens to align with Hovor's geopolitical positioning.
Honest disclosure: speech recognition accuracy depends on your specific voice, accent, environment, and content. There's no universal "it works X% of the time" claim that survives contact with reality.
What you can do: install the free tier (no credit card, generous on-device quota) and dictate three real paragraphs of your typical content. If accuracy isn't good enough, uninstall — no commitment.
Internal testing on Ukrainian news articles, novels, technical documentation, and casual conversation shows ~95–97% word accuracy on standard Ukrainian, with lower numbers in heavy dialect or extreme code-switching. The cleanup pass (LLM) bumps perceived quality further by fixing punctuation and capitalization.
| Platform | UA quality | Privacy | iPhone keyboard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple system Dictation | Decent (system-level) | On-device on Apple Silicon | Yes (built-in) |
| Google Voice Typing | Good | Cloud | Via Gboard |
| Wispr Flow | Listed; not "pro-tuned" | Cloud (OpenAI/Meta) | Yes |
| Superwhisper | Whisper baseline | Local + cloud options | Limited |
| Hovor | Native (Parakeet v3) | On-device by default | System-wide |
| Notta / Voice In | Cloud, English-biased | Cloud | Browser only |
If you draft articles, blog posts, or essays in Ukrainian, dictating is 3–5× faster than typing. Hovor's long-form recording (no 6-min cap), AI cleanup, and on-device privacy work for this use case without compromise.
Lecture notes, essay drafts, research summaries — Ukrainian academic prose is verbose, and dictating saves hours. Free tier covers most students' weekly use; Pro for heavy users.
50–70% of programmers face RSI at some point. For Ukrainian-speaking devs, Hovor + a Ukrainian custom dictionary (your function names, library names, project nouns) gets you usable hands-free dictation in your native language.
Lawyers, doctors, consultants, managers who switch between Ukrainian and English mid-day. Hovor's auto-language-detection (with workflow per-app rules) handles the switch automatically.
Composing long Telegram or Signal messages, replying to emails, writing Notes — voice is faster than thumbs, especially in Ukrainian where sentences are typically longer.
Ukrainian voice data has unfortunate history: training datasets that misclassified UA as RU, recordings ending up in Russian-tied service providers, voice prints in commercial products without clear consent. Hovor's privacy model is engineered for users who care:
| Price | What you get | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 2000 cloud words/week + a free weekly on-device quota |
| Pro Monthly | $11.99 | Unlimited words, 5 devices, priority support |
| Pro Yearly | $89.99 | ~$7.50/mo billed annually |
| Local Unlock (one-time) | $49.99 / 1999 UAH | Unlimited offline dictation + unlimited dictionary/snippets/workflows |
| BYOK Unlock (one-time) | $24.99 / 999 UAH | Use your own OpenAI/Anthropic/custom keys forever |
| Local + BYOK Bundle | $69.99 / 2799 UAH | Both unlocks, ~$5 cheaper than separately |
The free tier includes 2000 cloud words/week plus a free weekly quota for on-device transcription on iPhone (Parakeet v3) and Mac (EuroLLM cleanup). For most students and casual writers, Free is enough. Pro is for power users who want unlimited cloud access, sync across 5 devices, and priority support. The one-time unlocks are family-shareable and sold on both the App Store (iOS) and Monobank web (macOS). BYOK keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, or any custom OpenAI-compatible endpoint like Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM) stay in your Keychain and never pass through Hovor's server.
Технічно — так, Parakeet v3 розпізнає змішану мовлення, але результат буде непередбачуваним. Краще диктувати або українською, або англійською, не змішуючи в одному реченні.
Yes. On-device Parakeet v3 + (Mac) EuroLLM or (iOS 26+) Apple Foundation Models cover the full pipeline offline. iPhones without enough RAM (under 4 GB) fall back to cloud Whisper, which requires connectivity.
Так. Конфігурація, рекомендована для журналістів: speech model = Parakeet v3 (на пристрої), cleanup model = Apple Foundation Models (iOS 26+) або вимкнений (raw transcript). Аудіо ніколи не залишає пристрій. Зберігайте транскрипти локально, синхронізуйте лише словник.
Parakeet v3 doesn't support Russian by design (NVIDIA's training scope). Hovor's cloud Whisper path supports Russian if you really need it — but our positioning prioritizes Ukrainian and other European languages, not Russian.
Через App Store (картка, Apple Pay) — стандартні Apple ціни, можливо перевід валюти. Або через сайт hovor.app — Monobank приймає українські картки в гривні. Pro-підписка та одноразові розблокування (Local Unlock 1999 ₴, BYOK Unlock 999 ₴, бандл 2799 ₴) доступні через Monobank.
Free tier, no credit card, a generous on-device quota. iPhone and Mac (Windows coming soon).
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