Which Arabic Dialects Do Speech-to-Text Tools List?
A table of which Arabic varieties seven services name on their own pages, from Egyptian and Gulf to Maghrebi. It shows labels, not accuracy.
The Scriptorium team ·
Services label Arabic by country, not by dialect, and they label it differently: Microsoft Azure lists 18 Arabic locales, Google Cloud's Chirp 3 list has 18 of them in the rows we read, Word's Transcribe 11, Google Docs voice typing 14, Teams 2, Amazon Transcribe 2, and Google Meet 4 families (all beta). Below we sort those country labels into the dialect families people ask about. A listed locale shows what the service lets you pick; none of these pages gives an Arabic accuracy figure, so this is not a ranking.
The table
| Dialect family | Azure Speech | Google Cloud (Chirp 3) | Amazon Transcribe | Teams captions | Word Transcribe | Docs voice typing | Google Meet captions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Egyptian | Egypt | Egypt | none | none | Egypt | Egypt | Egypt (beta) |
| Levantine | all (5) | all (5) | none | none | Lebanon, Syria, Jordan | Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Israel | Levant (beta) |
| Gulf | all (6) | all (6) | UAE, Saudi Arabia | UAE, Saudi Arabia | all (6) | all (6) | UAE (beta) |
| Iraqi | Iraq | Iraq | none | none | Iraq | none | none |
| Maghrebi | Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya | Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania | none | none | none | Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia | Maghrebi (beta) |
| Yemeni | Yemen | Yemen | none | none | none | none | none |
| Sudanese | none | none | none | none | none | none | none |
How to read it: each cell names the countries from that family that the service lists (or "all" with a count). "none" means we did not find it on the page we read. The family grouping is ours, because vendors list countries; Saudi Arabia, for example, spans several regional dialects. Israel and Palestine are shown under Levantine because that is the nearest family, and Libya and Mauritania under Maghrebi. The Sudanese row is empty because we saw no Sudan locale on any of the pages.
What the table shows
- The Gulf is the only family every service names. Egyptian is named by five of the seven (Azure, Google Cloud, Word Transcribe, Docs voice typing and Meet); Teams and Amazon list only Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
- Maghrebi is named by four of the seven: Azure, Google Cloud, Docs voice typing and Meet (beta). Word Transcribe, Teams and Amazon Transcribe list no Maghrebi country.
- Iraqi and Yemeni are listed by Azure and Google Cloud, and Iraq by Word.
- Saudi Arabia and the UAE appear almost everywhere, including the two-entry lists of Amazon Transcribe and Teams, which may say more about market than about the dialects themselves.
What the table does not show
- Accuracy. None of the pages gives one. A service that lists Moroccan Arabic is not shown to transcribe it better than one that lists only Modern Standard Arabic.
- Whether the locale is a different model. Some locales may share one model; the pages we read do not say.
- Cost and availability. Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon are developer services; Word needs Microsoft 365; Docs voice typing is live-only. See Google Docs and Word and Zoom, Teams and Meet.
Where does Scriptorium fit?
We do not offer a dialect choice. Arabic is one setting among 33 languages, run on Whisper-family models, and the free preview uses the small model. Our only Arabic accuracy measurement is three clips of read Egyptian Arabic, where the small model's word error rate was 31.8% (method and data). For the practical side, read how to transcribe Arabic dialects and the most accurate free Arabic transcription?
What to do with this
- Find your dialect's family in the table and see which services name it.
- Take 60 to 90 seconds of your own audio in that dialect.
- Run it through two or three of the services, including one that does not list your dialect.
- Compare the drafts against your own correct text (word error rate) before you choose.
Checked on 2026-10-26. Microsoft Azure Speech language support (Arabic rows of the speech-to-text table), Google Cloud Speech-to-Text supported languages (the Arabic Chirp 3 rows of the list we read), Amazon Transcribe supported languages, Microsoft's Teams live-captions and Word Transcribe pages, Google Docs voice typing help and Google Meet's live-captions page. Google's list was longer than we could read in one pass, so a locale missing from our reading may exist elsewhere on the page. The mapping from countries to dialect families is our own grouping. Menus, prices and limits change; confirm on the vendor's page before you rely on them.