Voice Math Solver — Say a Word Problem, Get the Answer

Tap the microphone and say a calculation, or type it. The answer appears immediately, with the expression it understood printed above it so you can see whether it heard you correctly.

Want the answer read back to you as well? The talking calculator page runs the same solver with speech output switched on.

Every line below was run through the parser that powers the calculator above. Say them, or type them — spelled-out numbers work as well as digits, and so do the spoken lead-ins people naturally use (“what's…”, “how much is…”, “calculate…”).

• “what is 35 times 12”420
• “1250 divided by 4 plus 18”330.5
• “20% of 80”16
• “forty five percent of two hundred”90
• “one hundred twenty divided by four”30
• “3.99 times 21 times 0.7”58.653
• “three point nine nine times 21 times zero point seven”58.653
• “(85 + 15) × 0.7 ÷ 3 ^ 2”7.777777778
• “2 to the power of 10”1,024
• “square root of 25 plus square root of 16”9
• “5 squared plus 12 squared”169
• “half of eighty”40
• “a third of 90”30
• “two thousand five hundred minus five hundred”2,000
• “1,299.50 plus 0.50”1,300
• “85 divided by 340 times 100”25

So the working set is: the four operations, parentheses, decimals, percentages, powers, square roots, and the fraction words “half” and “a third”. Thousands separators are stripped, and in languages that use a decimal comma the comma is read as a decimal point.

Almost every failure is a phrasing problem, not a recognition problem. Four rules cover most of it.

• Percentages need a base. 20% of 80 works. 20% off 129.99 does not — “off” is a shopping word, not an operator. Say 129.99 minus 20% of 129.99 and you get 103.992.
• Say the operation, not the intent. 85 divided by 340 times 100 gives 25. “What is 85 as a percentage of 340” asks the solver to infer the formula, and it will not guess.
• Brackets are easier typed than spoken. (85 + 15) × 0.7 ÷ 3 ^ 2 evaluates; “open parenthesis eighty-five plus fifteen close parenthesis…” does not.
• Currency symbols are ignored, currency logic is not. $12.99 times 3 is fine — the symbol is simply dropped. Tax, tips and per-unit comparisons are reasoning, and go to the app.

There is a fuller list of spoken forms per language — “fois”, “mal”, “per”, “乘以”, “गुणा” — on the how-to page.

These are genuine word problems: the numbers are all there, but working out which operation to apply is the actual task. The browser solver recognises that it cannot help and says so rather than returning a wrong number.

• “Split an $85 dinner bill among 4 people with 15% tip — how much each?”
• “Which is better: 10 items for $3.99 or 12 for $4.99?”
• “$7.99 per bottle, buy three get 20% off — what's the average actual price per bottle?”
• “If I buy 3 items at $12.99 each with 8% tax, how much is my total?”
• “What's 20% off $129.99?”
• “Convert 72°F to Celsius”, “How many kilometres in 8.5 miles?”
• “It's 4:16 PM in New York — what time is it in Tokyo?”

VoiceCalc for iPhone and iPad takes exactly these. Apple's speech recognition transcribes what you said, an AI language model interprets it, and the answer comes back with the intermediate reasoning shown for multi-step problems. There is a calculation history, and follow-up questions work.

A solver that only ever hands back a number teaches nothing. Two things make the difference between a shortcut and a study tool.

• Read the expression, not just the answer. The browser solver prints what it understood — 1250 ÷ 4 + 18 — above the result. If that line is wrong, the answer is wrong, and spotting the mismatch is most of the learning.
• Check the working. For multi-step problems the iOS app shows the intermediate steps rather than only the total, which is the part you can compare against your own attempt.
• Say the problem before you solve it. Having to phrase “fifteen percent of eighty-five” out loud forces the translation from words to operation — the step students most often skip.

What neither tool does is graphing, symbolic algebra or formal proofs. For those, use a dedicated CAS or graphing tool; a voice solver is the wrong shape for them.

The browser solver is not an English parser with translations bolted on. Each of the site's 19 languages has its own operator words and number grammar, because spoken numbers do not work the same way twice: Italian “trentacinque per dodici” is one word for thirty-five, French counts in twenties, and Chinese “三十五乘以十二” is positional.

• “trentacinque per dodici (it)”420
• “treinta y cinco por doce (es)”420
• “trinta e cinco vezes doze (pt)”420
• “三十五乘以十二 (zh)”420
• “35 गुणा 12 (hi)”420
• “1250 dividido entre 4 más 18 (es)”330.5

Switch language from the footer and the microphone switches with it — the recogniser is asked for that language's BCP-47 voice, so it stops trying to hear English. The App Store listing itself is localised in 30 languages.

The talking version of this solver — the one that reads the answer back — is also written natively in Spanish, Portuguese and Hindi. What happens to what you say is set out in the privacy policy.