Type with your voice in any app.
Hold one key and talk. Dictera punctuates what you said, strips the fillers, and puts it exactly where your cursor is - up to 100+ spoken languages, depending on the model you choose. Entirely on your Mac: no account, no cloud, no internet connection.
Free 14-day trial · No account needed · Designed for Apple Silicon · macOS 26 or later
Speak anywhere you can type
Dictera lives in the menu bar and writes into whatever app has focus - email, docs, chat, terminals, IDEs. There's nothing to copy and nothing to switch to.
Your shortcut, your way
Hold a modifier push-to-talk style, double-tap it, or record any combination - bound to the left key, the right key, or either.
Text that fits where it lands
Dictera looks at what's immediately before the cursor and joins on correctly, instead of doubling a space or a full stop - now including Electron apps like Slack, VS Code, Notion, Discord and Teams, which hide their text from macOS until an assistive app asks for it. That fragment is never sent to a cloud model.
Stops when you do
Optional voice-activity detection ends the recording when you stop talking. esc cancels, and you choose whether the audio is still transcribed or thrown away.
Say the punctuation
"New line", "new paragraph", "comma", "question mark", "scratch that" - structure without touching the keyboard.
It knows the language automatically
No menu, nothing to pick. Dictera works out what you're speaking as you speak - and you can switch language mid-sentence and still get each word in the right script.
Four speech engines
From Apple's system engine to the latest multilingual models from Nvidia and Alibaba. Download the one that fits your languages and hardware, and switch whenever.
Pin a language when it helps
Automatic detection is the default; pinning one gives the recognizer a hint for extra accuracy.
Speak one language, type another
A separate shortcut inserts a clean translation instead of a transcription - 29 target languages, fillers removed, punctuation fixed.
Teach it your words
Custom replacements so names, brands and jargon come out exactly right every time.
And it fixes what you've already written
This is the part most dictation apps don't do. Select text anywhere on your Mac and Dictera will clean it up, translate it, or rewrite it from a spoken instruction - in place, one undo away.
Edit Selection by voice
Select text, hold a key, and say the change: "make it shorter", "turn this into bullet points", "draft a reply". The rewrite lands in place.
Correct Selection
Grammar, spelling and punctuation fixed where they sit - one undoable edit, and an unchanged result is left alone rather than pasted over itself.
Translate Selection
Read foreign text without touching the document: the translation appears in a floating panel.
Cleanup before it lands
An on-device model removes filler words and fixes punctuation as you dictate. If it ever fails, you still get the raw transcript.
None of it leaves your Mac
Speech recognition and the cleanup model both run locally. Once a model is downloaded, everything here works with no network at all.
No account, ever
No signup, no email, no password. Nothing to opt out of.
History stays local
Every transcription is searchable, pinnable and exportable - stored only on this Mac, with retention you set, and switchable off entirely.
Your own model, if you'd rather
Point cleanup and translation at six local servers or seven cloud providers instead. The built-in model needs no setup and stays the default.
Verifiable
No analytics SDK, no telemetry, and a short list of hosts the app ever contacts - see Security & data handling.
From the blog
Dictation for wrist pain: a setup that spares your hands
Dictation removes the typing, not the key press that starts it. How to set a Mac up so a page of writing costs one tap, and what it cannot fix.
· 7 min read
Why dictating is faster than typing, and when it is not
Speech beats typing on words a minute and loses on anything short, exact or half-formed. Where the time actually goes, and how to widen the gap.
· 6 min read
Say the punctuation: the commands that work in every app
Nine spoken commands give a dictation its shape: new line, new paragraph, the punctuation marks and scratch that. What each does, and when you can skip them.
· 5 min read
There's a second half to this app.
The same audio pipeline also powers an AI Assistant: live answers during calls, meeting write-ups without a bot in the room, and a private typed chat.
Try it free for 14 days.
Everything unlocked, no card, no account.
Then €5.99/month or €59.99/year · One license, 3 Macs