Dictano

The dictation app for Mac that never sends your voice anywhere

Press ⌥ Space, speak, press it again. Your words appear where your cursor is, in any app. Transcription runs entirely on your Mac: offline, private, in about a second.

Download for Mac (free trial) Compare dictation apps
3 MB native app Works offline No subscription No account

How it works

1

Press ⌥ Space

A small recording bar appears with a live audio meter. Dictano listens from any app: your editor, browser, email, chat.

2

Speak naturally

Full sentences, punctuation, technical terms, even switching languages mid-sentence. Whisper large-v3-turbo handles it.

3

Press ⌥ Space again

About a second later the text is typed right where your cursor was. No window to copy from, no cleanup step.

Private by architecture, not by promise

Most dictation apps for Mac send your audio to a server. That includes everything you dictate: emails about your health, notes about your clients, passwords you speak without thinking. The vendor promises to handle it carefully, and you have to take their word for it.

Dictano takes the other route. The speech model runs on your Mac's own chip. There is no server to trust because there is no server. No account, no telemetry on your dictations, nothing to leak. If you work under confidentiality rules (clinicians, lawyers, anyone with an NDA), that difference is not a preference. It is the whole decision.

Small and native, because it can be

Dictano is a 3 MB native Swift app that sits in your menu bar. It is not a wrapped web page. It launches instantly, idles at zero, and transcribes a typical sentence in about a second on Apple Silicon. The one-time model download (547 MB) is the same class of model that subscription apps run on their servers, running on yours.

What you getDictanoCloud dictation apps
Where audio is processedOn your MacVendor's servers
Works offlineYes, fullyNo
Account requiredNoYes
Pricing$29 once (7-day trial)$8 to $15 per month
App size3 MB150 to 400 MB
Types into any appYesYes

Who this is for

Frequently asked questions

Does my audio really stay on my Mac? +
Yes. Dictano runs the Whisper speech model on your own machine. There is no server, no account, and no network request during dictation. You can turn off Wi-Fi and it keeps working. The only download is the speech model itself, once, on first launch.
Which languages does it support? +
Auto-detection covers English, Spanish, German, Portuguese, French and the other languages Whisper large-v3 was trained on. You can also pin a language in the menu bar if you always dictate in the same one.
How accurate is it? +
Dictano uses Whisper large-v3-turbo, the same model family behind most paid dictation apps. On a normal speaking voice it produces clean, punctuated text. It handles technical vocabulary and mixed-language sentences better than the dictation built into macOS.
How is this different from the built-in macOS dictation? +
Apple's dictation is convenient but struggles with punctuation, jargon and longer passages, and the enhanced modes still have cloud dependencies for some languages. Dictano runs a larger model fully offline and types the result into any app, any text field, exactly where your cursor is.
What does it cost? +
A 7-day free trial, then a $29 one-time license. No subscription. Compare that with $15 a month for Wispr Flow or $8.49 a month for SuperWhisper Pro, forever.
What do I need to run it? +
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) and macOS 13+. The app itself is a 3 MB download; the speech model is a one-time 547 MB download on first launch.

Dictate your first sentence in under a minute

Download, grant the microphone permission, press ⌥ Space. That is the whole setup.

Download Dictano for Mac