The best dictation software for a Mac.

What this list covers

Live dictation, meaning you press a key, talk, and text appears in whatever you were typing in. Converting recorded files is a different job with different winners, covered on the transcription page. Several apps do both.

Every claim below was read off the vendor’s own site on the date stamped at the top. One of these apps is mine, marked wherever it comes up.

The options

Prices are what each vendor publishes today, ours included. They move, so the date above matters.

Best free: the one already on your Mac

Apple’s built-in Dictation costs nothing, works in every text field, and for supported languages it runs on-device. If you dictate a few times a week, install nothing. Its walls are real but specific: no custom vocabulary in Dictation, so your jargon stays wrong forever (macOS puts a custom vocabulary in Voice Control instead, a separate command-driven feature), and it stops after 30 seconds of silence. The full guide to it covers setup and the fixes. If Apple’s version disappoints you, MacWhisper’s free tier and Spokenly’s free local mode both add system-wide dictation at no cost.

Best open source: VoiceInk

GPL v3, developed in the open, local by default, and a one-time price you can avoid entirely by compiling it. It also ships optional cloud engines you can switch on, which is worth knowing rather than assuming. For anyone who wants to read the code their microphone feeds, it’s the only option here.

Best fully offline, and best for agents: Edict (ours)

Edict holds the strictest position here: the speech models are bundled in the app, it dictates offline from the first launch, and there is no cloud mode to switch on by accident. It stays verbatim, applying your own CSV dictionary and nothing else, which matters when the text is going to an AI agent that will act on it. There’s a wrong-window guard for when focus moves mid-sentence, and an MCP server so your agent can reach transcript history, the dictionary, and local file transcription. One-time purchase, 7-day full trial, Apple Silicon only. The catch is that last part: one platform, no phone app, no cloud sync, by design.

The subscriptions: Wispr Flow and Willow Voice

Both are polished, both are cross-platform, and both are cloud-first. Wispr Flow’s privacy page states it directly: "Transcription always happens in the cloud to provide the best speed and accuracy." Their free tier allows 2,000 words a week on Mac or Windows, with Pro at $15 a month or $12 billed annually. Willow Voice sells the same shape, $15 a month for Pro with a free tier on a smaller model. Their security page says Willow "runs on secure cloud infrastructure in the United States", and their homepage lists an offline mode that dictates "powered entirely by your device". Willow also advertises "3x more accurate than built-in dictation" and text "in as little as 200ms", which are their numbers, not measurements anyone else can reproduce.

If you dictate on a phone as well as a Mac, or want the cloud’s bigger models, this is the honest end of the market for you. The trade is a monthly bill and, on the default path, audio leaving your machine.

Which is the most accurate?

Nobody can answer this honestly, including us. There is no shared benchmark in this category, so vendors quote internal comparisons against whatever baseline flatters them, and "3x more accurate" or "99% accurate" are marketing constructions rather than measurements you could reproduce. What actually determines your accuracy is your microphone, your accent, how much jargon you use, and whether the app lets you fix the words it gets wrong.

That last factor is the one worth shopping for. A custom dictionary turns a permanent problem into a one-line fix, which is why Apple’s missing vocabulary feature is its real limit. Everything else you settle with a trial: dictate two paragraphs of your own work into each candidate, count the corrections.

What happened to Dragon on the Mac

Dragon was the name in dictation for two decades, and people still search for it. Nuance announced in October 2018 that it was dropping Macintosh support for its products, and Nuance itself has been part of Microsoft since 2022. There is no consumer Dragon for macOS today. The one Dragon that does run on a Mac is Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot, a clinical documentation product sold to healthcare organizations, which its App Store listing says needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. If you arrived here from that search wanting general dictation, the apps above are the replacements, and Apple’s built-in has quietly absorbed most of what casual Dragon users needed.

Common questions