Voice input — dictation listens in English

Dictation listens in English

Every microphone on the site — the homepage capture box, the Blink voice note, the bug reporter, OrbitPilot's mic and the dictation buttons in the admin — listens in English, whatever language you are reading the site in.

Why, and why it is temporary

Your browser does the listening and the transcribing. Browsers are genuinely good at English and noticeably poor at everything else, so offering a second language handed you a live transcript you then had to correct — which is worse than not offering it at all. There was briefly a small language chip next to each microphone; it has been removed, because a control whose result you cannot trust is not a feature.

Supporting other languages properly means transcribing the audio on our side rather than in your browser. That is real work and it is planned separately; this is a pause, not a decision that OrbitingFox is English-only.

What still works in any language

Typing, of course — the site's content language is unaffected, and nothing about reading or writing in your own language has changed. This is only about speaking to a microphone.

For developers

static/js/of-voice-lang.js remains the single source (window.OFVoiceLang.get()), and it must NOT be deleted: it exists because report #132 / local report #3 found that when the content language changed, some recorders locked to that language while the shared Blink recorder stayed hard-coded to English, so speech stalled either way. It now answers "en-US" always and attachChip() renders nothing. One flag, ENGLISH_ONLY, controls both; the remembered-choice machinery is kept dormant so restoring the feature is a one-line change. Every recorder still reads the helper with a fallback, and those fallbacks must stay — parity is enforced by adminapp/test_voice_parity.py.