The voice typing app for Mac that you buy once.

Why the third year is the honest comparison

Fifteen dollars a month does not feel like much, and it is not, on the day you sign up. The reason it is worth doing the arithmetic anyway is that dictation is not a project with an end. If it works, you use it every day for years, which means you are comparing five hundred and forty dollars with fifteen.

That gap only makes sense if the money is paying for something recurring. For a cloud service it is: somebody is running machines that transcribe your audio, and they have a bill every month whether you use it or not. For software that runs on your own Mac's silicon, nobody has a recurring cost, and the subscription is a pricing decision rather than a technical one.

What you actually want it to do

your shortcut

Listening… 0:04

Hold it to talk, tap it to toggle, Escape cancels. Pick the key in Settings.

Voice typing is worth having when three things are true at once. The words arrive fast enough that you keep talking, which means under about a quarter of a second. They arrive in whatever application you are already in, rather than in a window you then copy out of. And they are spelled correctly, including the words your work uses and ordinary English does not.

The third one is where most of them fall down, and it is the one you cannot tell from a demonstration video, because the demonstration is always someone saying an ordinary sentence.

The vocabulary question

A general speech model spells what it thinks it heard. If what you write contains library names, drug names, case citations, product names or the surname of a colleague, the model guesses the nearest ordinary word. You notice, you fix it, and tomorrow it happens again.

Zumbo handles it two ways. Twenty one vocabulary packs cover fields like developer tools, legal, medical, design and marketing, switched on by what you say you dictate most during setup. Then anything still wrong takes three seconds: select the word, type what you meant, press Teach, and it is heard your way from then on. The corrections stay on your Mac.

Where the words go

Worth checking before you buy anything. Zumbo, Superwhisper, MacWhisper and VoiceInk all state that the transcription happens on your Mac. Wispr Flow does not state offline use on its own pages, which is what you would expect from a service. If your work can go to a server, that is a legitimate choice and the cloud products are polished. If it cannot, the choice is already made for you.

The short version

Start with Apple Dictation, because it is free and installed. When it stops being enough, and for most people it does, the question is whether you would rather pay once for something that runs on your machine or monthly for something that does not. This page is the arithmetic for that decision.

Related: all six side by side, feature by feature, the case against subscription dictation, and speech to text on the Mac.