Dictation that works with the Wi-Fi off.
The speech engine ships inside the download. Pull the plug on the router and Zumbo behaves exactly the same, because nothing was ever going anywhere.
Why most dictation stops when the network does
Cloud dictation records a buffer of your voice, uploads it, waits for a server to answer, and pastes what comes back. That round trip is why it feels laggy on a slow connection and why it stops entirely on a plane, in a basement office, or on a train between cells.
What Zumbo does instead
The model runs on your Mac's own silicon. Press the key, talk, and the text is composed locally in about a fifth of a second. The 570 MB download is large for a dictation app precisely because the engine is in it, once, instead of living on someone else's machine.
The only network calls Zumbo makes
- Your license key, once, when you activate.
- A version number, once a day, to check for an update.
- A feedback message, only if you write one and press Send.
Block all three at the firewall and dictation still works. Nothing about your audio or your text is in any of them.
Where this actually matters
Flights and trains. Client sites that will not put an unknown app on their network. Hospital and legal environments where uploading a recording is not a decision an individual gets to make. And ordinary days when the connection is simply bad.