Voice to text on your Mac,
running on the Mac itself.
Hold a key, talk, and finished text lands wherever your cursor is — in Mail, Pages, Safari, Slack, any app. VoiceNote transcribes and writes on your own Mac: nothing is uploaded, it works fully offline, and it's a one-time purchase, not another subscription.
Native on your Mac — the speech model runs on your processor.
On-device, on Apple Silicon
The speech model runs on the Mac's own processor — no GPU required, no cloud queue, no per-word pricing. Your voice never leaves the machine.
Types into any app
Global hotkey, a quiet overlay at the edge of the screen, and per-app formatting that knows Mail from a code editor. The finished text appears wherever your cursor is.
Learns your words
Correct a name or a technical term once and it's kept for good, on your Mac — so the vocabulary you use stops coming out as nonsense within about a week.
macOS already has Dictation. Why install anything?
Fair question — press the dictation key and macOS will take dictation for free, and on Apple Silicon it even runs on-device, which is more than you can say for Windows' cloud version. For an occasional sentence, it's genuinely fine. The gap shows up when you try to write by voice all day.
macOS Dictation types you verbatim — every "um", every false start, every "no, scratch that" — and it doesn't learn the names it mishears or shape the output to where you're writing. VoiceNote is built for the all-day case: it writes, not just transcribes, turning spoken rambling into clean sentences fit for the app you're in; it learns permanently, so a corrected name stays corrected; and it does all of it on your Mac, so it keeps working on a plane, on a site with no signal, and in organisations where audio isn't allowed to leave.
| VoiceNote | macOS Dictation | Cloud dictation subscriptions | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where speech is processed | On your Mac | On-device (Apple Silicon, many languages) | Vendor cloud |
| Works fully offline | Yes | Yes (on-device languages) | No |
| Learns your names & jargon | Yes — permanently | No | Partially |
| Cleans up how you actually talk | Yes — finished sentences | No — verbatim | Yes |
| Adapts output to the app | Yes — mail vs chat vs code | No | Rarely |
| Price | One-time, from $49 | Free | ~$10–20/month forever |
Private by architecture, not by promise
Everything above follows from one design decision: the model runs on your Mac. There's no account to create, nothing to upload, and no server of ours that ever hears your voice. That's why VoiceNote fits places cloud tools can't go — privileged legal work, clinical notes, regulated finance — and why the compliance story is short: your words never leave.
Also on Windows
VoiceNote runs on both platforms from a single one-time licence. If you move between a Mac and a PC, the same app, hotkey and learned vocabulary follow you — see dictation software for Windows, including native Windows-on-ARM. Coming from Dragon? The Dragon alternative guide covers the move (Dragon dropped its Mac version back in 2018).
Common questions
Does VoiceNote work on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs?
Yes. VoiceNote runs on macOS on Apple Silicon (M1 and later); the speech model uses the Mac's own processor, so transcription is fast and light on battery. It works on your Mac the same way it does on Windows — hold a key, talk, and finished text lands wherever your cursor is.
How is this different from the Dictation built into macOS?
macOS Dictation is genuinely good and, on Apple Silicon, runs on-device for many languages — so start there if you dictate the occasional sentence. VoiceNote is built for writing by voice all day: it cleans up how you actually talk into finished sentences instead of typing you verbatim, it learns the names and jargon you correct and keeps them for good, and it shapes the output to the app you're in — a tidy email in Mail, a one-liner in Slack, untouched text in a code editor. macOS Dictation does none of those.
Which apps does it work in?
All of them. VoiceNote types wherever your cursor is — Mail, Notes, Pages, Safari or Chrome, Slack, Notion, VS Code, your work system. There are no plugins or integrations, because it simply types like a keyboard.
Does it work offline?
Fully. After the one-time download of the app and its models, dictation runs entirely on your Mac — turn on airplane mode and it still works, because nothing was being sent anywhere to begin with.
Can it record and transcribe meetings on Mac?
Dictation runs on both Windows and Mac. Meeting capture — recording and summarising a call on-device — is Windows-first today, with Mac support coming. If meetings are your main need on Mac, check the current state on the Meetings page before you buy.
What does it cost?
A 3-day free trial, then a one-time purchase — $49 (Solo), $79 (Duo, 2 devices) or $99 (Family, 4 devices). No subscription, no account.
Write like you talk, everywhere your Mac takes you.
A tiny installer, one hotkey, and it's yours forever — on your Mac, nowhere else.