Dictate Safe vs macOS Dictation
macOS Dictation is free and built in. It also stops after a minute on an Intel Mac, has no vocabulary, no history, no support for code and no prompt library, and Apple's own documentation says whether your words stay on your Mac depends on what you are typing into. Dictate Safe does all of it, for as long as you talk.
Checked against their own published pages, 2026-09-23. Every price is in US dollars, as each company shows it, before any tax.
Every word, every time
Private in every field, not most of them
Apple's own documentation says on-device processing covers general text dictation, “but not dictating in a search box”, and tells you to check your settings to see what applies to your Mac. Here there is nothing to check. Nothing you say leaves your machine, wherever you are typing.
Learns your words
Names and jargon, spelled right
Add the names, product words and technical terms you actually use, and they come back spelled the way you spell them. macOS Dictation has no vocabulary list to teach.
Built for work
Prompts, and code by voice
Over a thousand prompts to search from the floating icon and paste into any AI tool, plus your own. And Code Mode: say “open paren” and get (. The built-in dictation does neither.
Nothing is lost
Everything you said, searchable
Every dictation is kept on your machine with its recording, so you can find what you said last Tuesday and play it back. Drop in a voice note someone sent you and get the text. macOS Dictation keeps nothing.
Every speed figure we publish comes off a 2018 laptop with no neural engine, because that is the machine this was built and tested on. If yours is an M-series Mac or a recent PC, it is doing less work than ours was.
macOS Dictation is free, and it is already on your Mac. That is a real advantage and the only one this page will concede without a fight. Everything else below is what free leaves out, and for anyone who dictates for work rather than for the occasional message, that list is the whole story.
Dictate Safe wins 10 of the 12 places they differ
| Dictate Safe | macOS Dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs you | ||
| Price | $129 one time purchase | Free, built into macOS |
| What leaves your machine | ||
| On your device for everything you dictateApple: on-device processing covers “general text Dictation (for example, composing messages and notes, but not dictating in a search box)”. | Yes, in every field, on every Mac it supports | Only for general text. Apple says not in a search box, and to check your settings for your Mac |
| A switch that blocks every outbound connection | Yes, including ours | No |
| What you can do with it | ||
| Custom vocabularyTeach it the names and terms it would otherwise get wrong. | Yes | No |
| Prompt library, and your own promptsWrite your own, edit any of them, and search the lot from the floating icon. | Yes. 1,000+ ready to use, plus as many of your own as you like, all kept on your machine | No |
| Code ModeSay a symbol and get the character, and name variables out loud. | Yes. “open paren” types (, “camel case get user name” types getUserName | No |
| Keep AwakeHand a job to an AI tool, walk off to a call, and come back to it finished instead of interrupted by the screen saver. | Yes, and it switches itself off at 20% battery so it cannot flatten your laptop | No |
| History of everything you dictatedSearch it, play the recording back, and delete any of it for good. | Yes, kept on your machine | No. Once it is typed, it is gone |
| Transcribe a voice note someone sent you | Yes, including WhatsApp voice notes | No |
| How long you can dictateApple: dictation “stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds”. | As long as you like, pauses included. Or choose a limit: 1, 2, 5 or 15 minutes | Stops at one minute on an Intel Mac, and after 30 seconds of silence on any Mac |
| Automatic punctuation | Yes | Yes |
| Where it runs | ||
LanguagesWorth knowing about big language countsA tool that lists many languages is not offering the same quality in all of them. Published benchmarks put real-world English around 8 to 12% word error, while lower-resource languages run past 25% on the same models. The number in a feature list is a count, not a promise about any one of them. | English | Many |
| Works on Windows | Yes | No. It is part of macOS |
#Why pay for something that is free
Because free was built for a different job. macOS Dictation is made for turning a sentence into a text message, and it does that well. It was never made for the person who dictates all day: the one whose words include a client’s name, a product that is spelled strangely, a function called getUserName, or a two-hundred-word prompt to an AI tool that has to be right the first time.
That person needs the dictation to know their words, which is a vocabulary list. They need to be able to find what they said yesterday, which is a history. They need code to come out as code. And increasingly they need somewhere to keep the prompts they send to AI tools every day. None of that is in the built-in feature, and none of it is ever going to be, because none of it is what the built-in feature is for.
#It does not cut you off mid-thought
On an Intel Mac, macOS Dictation stops after one minute. People speak at around 150 words a minute, so that is roughly 150 words, and a real prompt to an AI tool, the kind with context and constraints in it, is often longer. On every Mac it also stops by itself after 30 seconds of silence, which is exactly what happens when you pause to think about how to phrase the next part.
Dictate Safe keeps listening for as long as you are talking, pauses included. If you would like a safety net, choose one yourself: one, two, five or fifteen minutes. The default is no limit at all, because you are the one who knows when you have finished.
#Private every time, not most of the time
Apple is careful about dictation, and on a recent Mac much of it stays on the device. But read how Apple itself describes it: on-device processing covers “general text Dictation (for example, composing messages and notes, but not dictating in a search box)”, and Apple tells you to check your Keyboard settings to see whether it applies to your Mac at all. The privacy you get depends on where you are typing and what you are typing on.
When dictation is processed on Apple’s servers, Apple’s own privacy page says that “Apple may retain and use this data for up to two years to develop and improve Siri, Dictation, Search, and limited other language processing functionality.” That is a reasonable policy for a consumer feature. It is not one you can explain to a client whose NDA you signed.
Dictate Safe has one behaviour. Your speech is turned into text on your own machine, in every field, every time, and there is a switch that blocks the app from making any connection at all. You do not need to know which field counts.
#Check it yourself in a minute
You do not have to take anyone’s word for where your voice goes. For Apple, open System Settings → Keyboard and read the line under Dictation: Apple states there whether your dictation is processed on your device, for your Mac and your language. For Dictate Safe, turn off Wi‑Fi and dictate. It keeps working, because there was never anywhere for it to send anything.
#What we do not do
Dictate Safe is English. macOS Dictation covers many languages. A language count is a count, not a promise about any one of them, and we would rather be excellent at one than listed in many.
It is not free. It is one payment, and then it is yours, on your Mac and on your Windows machine, with nothing to renew.
How macOS Dictation handles your speech is described here in Apple’s own words, from Apple’s dictation guide and its Siri and Dictation privacy page, current as of the date on this page. It is not a claim Dictate Safe is making about Apple’s software. Apple can change this in any macOS release; the line under Dictation in your own Keyboard settings is always the current answer for your Mac.
Switching takes about ten minutes
Most of it is a download. Nothing has to be migrated, because nothing was ever on anybody else’s server.
Install it
About 70 MB, plus a speech model of roughly 150 MB that downloads once on first run.
Pick your key
The setup asks which key you want to hold, then has you dictate a sentence into the window so you can see it land before you leave.
Type in your words
Names and jargon go in the vocabulary list. Your old ones do not transfer, and there are usually fewer than twenty that matter.
Cancel the other one
That is the step that pays for this. Nothing in Dictate Safe expires, so there is never a second one of these.
Ready to stop paying rent on your own voice?
One payment, two machines, and it keeps working with the network switched off. Every claim on this page is checkable against their site and ours.