Mac dictation that never uploads your voice
Dragon Professional Individual for Mac was discontinued on 22 October 2018 and was never replaced. The Mac dictation tools that transcribe on-device today are Apple's built-in dictation, Vocemo, and a handful of local speech apps. Most of the popular paid options send your audio to a server, whatever their homepage says.
- Dragon for Mac
- Discontinued 22 October 2018, never replaced
- The test
- Turn off Wi-Fi. If dictation still works, it is on-device
- Vocemo
- $15 a month or $144 a year, on-device, 3 Macs
- Apple Dictation
- Free, built in, weak on custom vocabulary
What happened to Dragon for Mac?
Nuance discontinued Dragon Professional Individual for Mac on 22 October 2018. It was not replaced, and it received no further updates. Nuance was acquired by Microsoft in 2021, and the consumer dictation product went into maintenance on Windows only.
That left a real gap. Dragon's appeal was a large custom vocabulary, accurate handling of specialist terms, and processing that happened on your own computer. People who relied on it for medical, legal or technical dictation have been looking for a like for like replacement ever since, and most of what appeared instead was cloud based.
Which Mac dictation apps actually run on-device?
Prices verified September 2026. "On-device" here means the transcription itself happens on your Mac, tested by turning the network off.
| Tool | Transcribes on-device | Price | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Dictation | Yes, on Apple silicon | Free | No custom vocabulary worth the name, no text cleanup |
| Vocemo | Yes | $15 a month, or $144 a year | macOS 13+ and Apple silicon only. No Windows, no mobile |
| superwhisper | Yes | Free tier, paid from around $10 a month | Dictation only, no document or photo tools |
| MacWhisper | Yes | One time licence | Built around files more than live typing |
| Wispr Flow | No, cloud | $15 a month, or $12 billed yearly | Audio leaves your machine |
| Otter | No, cloud | $16.99 a month, Business $30 per user | Built for meetings, not for typing into apps |
| Dragon (Windows) | Mostly, on Windows | Around $699 one time | Not available for Mac since 2018 |
If you would rather this ran on your own Mac, that is what Vocemo does. Free for 7 days, then $15 a month for 3 Macs.
Download free for MacHow do you check whether a dictation app uploads your voice?
Install it, open a text field, disconnect from the network, and dictate a sentence. Tools that transcribe locally carry on. Tools that do not will either hang, show a connection error, or quietly produce nothing. It takes ten seconds and it is more reliable than any privacy page.
A second check: watch the installed size. Speech models are large. An app that occupies 40 MB and never downloads anything is not running a speech model on your machine.
What do you lose by going on-device?
Stated plainly, because the trade is real.
- No phone app and no sync. The work happens on one machine, so it stays there.
- No shared team workspace. There is no server to share through.
- Disk space. Models take between 76 MB and 2.5 GB depending on which you use.
- A first-use download. The model has to arrive before the feature works offline.
If you need a team dashboard, mobile capture, or transcripts shared across an organisation, a cloud tool is the right answer and you should buy one. The on-device case is for work that should not leave the building.
What about accuracy on specialist vocabulary?
This was Dragon's real strength and it is the fair question. Modern speech models handle general speech better than Dragon ever did, and handle rare proper nouns worse unless you help them. The practical fix is a vocabulary list: a few dozen terms, names and drug or case names that get boosted during recognition. Vocemo ships nine such presets, including medical, veterinary, dental, therapy, legal and software, and you can edit any of them.
How do you turn on dictation that is already in macOS?
Before paying anyone, switch on what you have. It is free, it runs on the machine on Apple silicon, and for a lot of people it is enough.
- Open System Settings, then Keyboard.
- Turn on Dictation. macOS will offer to download a language, which is what makes it work with the network off. Let it finish.
- Set the shortcut. The default is pressing the microphone key, or Control twice. Pick something you can hit without looking.
- Put your cursor in any text field, press the shortcut, and talk.
Two settings are worth changing straight away. Add every language you actually use, because switching mid sentence otherwise produces nonsense. And under Accessibility, look at Voice Control if you want to move the cursor and click by voice as well as type, which is a separate system.
How accurate is on-device dictation now?
Much better than its reputation, which was set years ago by systems that ran on far less capable hardware. On clear speech, in a quiet room, with a decent microphone and ordinary vocabulary, a modern on-device model lands in the same range as a cloud one. Most people cannot tell the two apart from the output.
The gap that remains is narrower than the marketing on either side suggests. Cloud models still tend to be ahead on very unusual proper nouns, on heavy background noise, and on strongly accented speech in a language the local model was not heavily trained on. On-device models are ahead on latency and on never having a bad day because a server is busy.
Set your expectation at the right place: you are aiming for text that needs a light edit, not text that needs none. That has been true of every dictation system ever made, including the ones that cost $699.
What actually wrecks dictation accuracy?
When dictation is going badly, it is almost never the model. In rough order of how much difference each one makes:
- The microphone and the distance to it. This is the big one. A headset or an external microphone 20 cm from your mouth beats the built-in array across the room by more than any change of software will. If you fix one thing, fix this.
- Room noise and echo. A hard-surfaced room with a fan running is a much harder problem than an accent.
- Talking while thinking. Long pauses mid sentence, restarts and trailing off are hard to punctuate correctly. Compose the sentence, then say it.
- Mumbling the ends of words. Word endings carry the grammar, and they are the first thing to go when you speak quietly.
- Cross-talk. Two people at once defeats every system.
- Jargon and names. Real, and fixable with custom vocabulary. See below.
Test it honestly before blaming the software: read the same paragraph twice, once into the built-in microphone from across the desk and once into a headset. The difference is usually larger than the difference between any two products in the table above.
How do you dictate punctuation and formatting?
Spoken commands, and they are broadly the same across macOS dictation and the apps that build on it. Saying them is faster than reaching for the keyboard once the handful you use become automatic.
| Say this | You get |
|---|---|
| full stop, or period | . |
| comma | , |
| question mark | ? |
| exclamation mark | ! |
| open quote, close quote | " " |
| new line | A line break |
| new paragraph | A blank line and a new paragraph |
| cap, or capital | Capitalises the next word |
| all caps on, all caps off | CAPITALISES EVERYTHING BETWEEN |
| numeral five | 5 rather than five |
| smiley face | :-) |
Learn four of them and you will use dictation ten times more often: full stop, comma, new paragraph and new line. The rest can wait.
Can you teach it your own words?
This is where the free option runs out first, and it matters more than raw accuracy for anyone working in a specialist field. No dictation system, local or cloud, reliably spells an unusual drug name, a case citation, a client's surname or an internal product code that it has never seen.
What helps is a vocabulary list: you give it the words and it biases towards them. A surgeon's list, a lawyer's list and a game developer's list have nothing in common, which is exactly why a generic model cannot solve this for everyone at once. macOS gives you text replacements, which is a blunt version of the same idea and worth setting up even if you go no further.
When you evaluate any dictation tool, test it on twenty words from your own field rather than on a sample paragraph. That is the test that predicts whether you will still be using it in a month.
How fast is it, and what does real time mean?
There are two speeds worth separating, and vendors tend to quote whichever flatters them.
- Latency is the gap between finishing a sentence and seeing it. On Apple silicon with a local model this is typically well under a second, because there is no round trip. A cloud tool adds the network on top, which is fine on good Wi-Fi and painful on a train.
- Throughput is how fast a long recording is processed. This is where a bigger cloud machine can win on paper, though for live typing it is irrelevant, because you cannot speak faster than you speak.
For dictation specifically, latency is the number that decides whether the tool feels good. A system that is 2% more accurate but takes two seconds to show you anything will lose to the faster one every time, because you stop trusting it and start watching it.
Does dictation work in every app?
Mostly, and where it fails there is a pattern worth knowing. Anything that behaves like a standard macOS text field takes dictated text without complaint: Mail, Notes, Slack, Pages, browsers, most chat apps.
The awkward cases are apps that draw their own text handling rather than using the system's, which is common in code editors, terminals, some design tools and older cross-platform apps. Dictation may put text in the wrong place or nowhere at all.
The reliable workaround is a tool that transcribes and then pastes, rather than typing into the field directly. Pasting works anywhere a keyboard shortcut works, which is everywhere. If you live in a terminal or a code editor, check specifically that this path exists before you buy anything.
Which one should you actually use?
Short version, in the order most people should try them:
- Start with what is in macOS. It is free, it runs on-device on Apple silicon and it costs you ten minutes to switch on. If it is enough, stop there.
- Move to an on-device app when you hit the ceiling: custom vocabulary, cleaner punctuation, text that gets tidied rather than transcribed verbatim, dictation that works in apps the system one struggles with.
- Take a cloud tool only if it does something the local ones genuinely do not, and you are comfortable with your voice being processed elsewhere. For a lot of work, particularly anything covered by a client confidentiality obligation, that comfort is the whole question.
Questions
Is Dragon NaturallySpeaking available for Mac in 2026?
No. Dragon Professional Individual for Mac was discontinued on 22 October 2018 and has not been replaced. Dragon continues on Windows only.
Does Apple's built-in dictation work offline?
On Apple silicon Macs, yes, for the languages you have downloaded. It is genuinely on-device and it is free. Its weaknesses are custom vocabulary, punctuation on long passages, and the lack of any cleanup pass.
Is on-device dictation accurate enough for medical or legal work?
For general speech, yes. For specialist terms, only if you give it a vocabulary list. No dictation tool, cloud or local, reliably spells an unusual drug name or case citation it has never seen. Always proofread anything that goes into a record.
How fast is on-device dictation compared with cloud dictation?
Usually faster for short dictation, because there is no upload and no queue. A sentence is transcribed as you finish saying it. Long recordings are comparable.
Can I use on-device dictation in any app?
That depends on the tool, not on where the model runs. Vocemo pastes into whatever application has focus, which requires macOS Accessibility permission. Apple Dictation works in standard text fields.
What does Vocemo cost?
$15 a month, or $144 a year, which works out at $12 a month. One subscription covers up to three Macs and includes every feature. There is a 7-day free trial and no account to create.
Sources
Every price on this page was read from the vendor's own page on the date shown above. Prices change; if you find one out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
Competitor prices in this article were checked in September 2026. Prices change; if you find one out of date, write to us and we will correct it.