Japanese and English dictation on a Mac
What I learned using Japanese and English dictation in Tokyo. Switching languages, mixed sentences, and tone per app.
I work in Tokyo and move between English, Spanish and Japanese every day. When I started dictating, switching languages became the main source of friction.
If switching is a chore, you stop dictating
Most apps make you pick one input language in settings. Move from a Japanese Slack thread to an English email and you open settings and flip it. By the third time you want to give up. Nearly every dictation app I abandoned, I abandoned for this reason.
How Yubi picks a language
In automatic mode, Yubi chooses Japanese or English from the Mac's current language setting. If your Mac runs in Japanese you get Japanese, in English you get English. The other option is to pin one. In a meeting where you know you will only speak Japanese, pinning is steadier.
Yubi does not yet listen to the first few words and switch on its own. I want to build that, but it is not written, so I will not claim it.
Mixed sentences
Japanese sentences with English product names inside them are everyday speech. Figma no component, Slack no thread. The sentence is processed as Japanese and the English word comes out as katakana or a mangled spelling. There is no complete fix yet. What Yubi can do is take the English words you use often and pass them to the Japanese model as recognition hints. I keep Figma, Slack and Notion in that list.
Tone per app
Separate from language, there is tone. The same thought is written casually in Slack and properly in Mail. Yubi looks at the app you are typing into and adjusts: shorter in Slack, tidier sentence endings in Mail. These are plain rules that run on the Mac, nothing is sent to an AI, and Japanese and English have their own rule sets.
About Spanish
People ask, so here it is. Yubi is Japanese and English only for now. I wanted to start with the two languages I use every day and can tune with confidence. SpeechAnalyzer reports its supported locales at runtime, but Yubi currently implements Japanese and English only.
A real day
Morning, a LINE message to family in Japanese. A Slack reply in English, after switching the setting to English. Meeting notes in Japanese at noon. A draft of an article in English at night. That is a few switches a day, two clicks each. Once that stopped feeling like a chore, dictation became a habit.