Voisty alternatives: what to use if Russian and payment from Russia matter

Potok transcribes Russian speech; this site has been translated into English for convenience.

Voisty recognizes speech on the device with local models such as Whisper and Parakeet, without sending audio to a server. Russian is on its list of 90+ supported languages, but there is no public data on recognition quality for Russian, and the service does not say whether Russian cards are accepted. Potok (potok.now) works differently: a cloud model trained specifically for Russian speech, payment by a Russian bank card and 2500 words per week for free.

Voisty is sold as an offline transcriber with local models and a subscription in dollars, and for many people in Russia the questions start right there. The service does not explicitly list a Russian bank card among accepted payment methods, and of its 90+ claimed languages nothing is publicly known about the quality of Russian. Buying a subscription only to find that recognition mixes up terms and names is a common scenario with little-known multilingual models. Some people look for a replacement because of this; others simply because Voisty was not built in the first place for on-the-fly dictation, as opposed to transcribing finished recordings. Other options for dictation in Russian are collected in the section of alternatives to voice input.

Why people look for a Voisty replacement

The main reason is unverified Russian. Russian is formally on the list of 90+ supported languages, but the developer publishes no data on how Voisty handles Russian speech, terms and names. With general-purpose multilingual models, quality on less popular languages is often noticeably lower than on English, and the only way to find out whether that is the case here is to test your own text.

The second reason is payment. Voisty accepts Visa, Mastercard, Amex and PayPal cards, but nowhere says explicitly whether cards from Russian banks go through. For a user in Russia this is a risk of signing up for a subscription and getting a declined payment at the payment step, instead of knowing it in advance.

The third is transparency. The legal entity behind Voisty is not named in open sources. For a service that is trusted with voice recordings, the lack of a clear legal entity is a reason to be more cautious than with an ordinary text app.

Finally, check the use case itself. The Voisty free plan is described as “5 minutes of transcription to evaluate quality”, a wording closer to a one-off transcription of a finished recording than to constant dictation into work fields all day. If the second scenario is what you need, first make sure that Voisty is about it at all, and not about a neighboring task.

What to check in a replacement

Before paying for a new subscription, it makes sense to settle a few questions in advance.

1. Test Russian recognition on your own text with real terms and names, not on a generic phrase from an advertisement, especially if the language is claimed “on a list” and not as a core one.
2. Find out the payment method from Russia in advance, not at the moment of the charge: whether a Russian bank card works directly or an intermediary is needed.
3. Look for open information about the service's legal entity: how clearly it states who processes your voice recordings and on what basis.
4. Define your use case: dictation on the fly straight into a work field or transcription of ready audio and video recordings. These are different tasks, and not every program is equally good at both.
5. Compare offline and cloud options for your task: a local model does not send audio to a server, but it needs computer resources and is not always updated as quickly as a cloud one.
6. Check whether there is a personal dictionary for the terms and names that a general multilingual model usually mixes up most often.
7. Compare the payment model (monthly, yearly or a one-time license) and work out which is cheaper at your dictation volume, not by the price on the home page.
8. Check the platforms: whether you need a version for Windows, macOS or both at once, if you work on different computers.

Who Potok will not suit instead of Voisty

Potok will not replace Voisty in its main task, transcribing ready audio and video recordings: Potok recognizes only what you say right now, during dictation, and does not work with files at all. Nor will it suit those for whom offline is essential: Potok is a cloud service, recognition runs on servers in Russia, and it does not work without the internet, unlike Voisty's local models. A program with fully offline recognition in Russian is covered in the comparison of GigaType and Potok.

Multilingual support is not general either: Potok is tuned for Russian speech and mixed Russian-English text, not for the whole list of 90-odd languages at once. If you need to speak a third or fourth language in the same program, that is not what Potok is for.

Frequently asked questions

Primary sources: voisty.com · voisty.com