If you've ever tried dictating on a Mac, you've probably used Apple's built-in Dictation feature. It's free, it's already there, and for firing off a quick text message it's fine. But if you've tried using it for anything serious — long emails, documents, notes, or writing in a code editor — you already know the frustration. The good news: you can dictate on Mac without Siri, and the alternatives are significantly better.
What's wrong with Apple's built-in dictation
Apple Dictation is powered by Siri's speech recognition engine, and while it's improved with Apple Silicon, it still has real limitations that show up fast once you move past short dictation bursts.
- Short timeout. Apple Dictation has an inactivity timeout. Pause to think for a few seconds and it stops listening. For natural speech where you pause to collect your thoughts, this is maddening.
- Mediocre accuracy on long passages. Short sentences come out okay. But once you're dictating multiple paragraphs, accuracy drifts. Missed words, incorrect homophones, and mangled punctuation pile up.
- No filler word cleanup. Say "um" or "you know" and that's exactly what ends up in your text. Real speech is messy — a good dictation tool should clean it up for you, not dump your verbal tics into the document.
- Privacy concerns. Even though Apple processes some dictation on-device, certain requests still get sent to Apple's servers. There's no clear toggle to guarantee everything stays local. If you're dictating sensitive work — legal documents, medical notes, client communications — that's a problem.
- Doesn't work everywhere. Apple Dictation is unreliable in terminal apps, code editors, and some third-party apps. If you use VS Code, a terminal, or anything outside Apple's standard text fields, dictation either doesn't activate or drops text unpredictably.
For a quick Siri command or a one-line reminder, built-in dictation is adequate. For real work, you need something else.
The alternatives: dictation on Mac without Siri
Several third-party apps offer Mac dictation that doesn't depend on Siri or iCloud. We've covered the full landscape in our comparison of the best voice-to-text apps for Mac, but here's a focused look at the options that specifically solve the Siri dictation problem.
SuperWhisper
SuperWhisper is built on OpenAI's Whisper model and can run locally on Apple Silicon. The transcription quality is genuinely good, especially with the larger model sizes. It supports multiple modes and can handle longer dictation sessions without the timeout issues that plague Apple's tool.
The downsides: it's a subscription at $10/month or $100/year, and the setup involves choosing between Whisper model sizes — tiny, small, medium, large — and understanding the speed/accuracy tradeoffs of each. The cloud mode sends audio to OpenAI's servers for processing. If you're technical and comfortable configuring models, SuperWhisper delivers. But it's more complex than most people need, and the subscription adds up to $120/year.
MacWhisper
MacWhisper also uses the Whisper model and runs locally, but it's primarily a file transcription tool, not a live dictation app. It excels at transcribing recorded audio — meetings, interviews, podcasts, voice memos. You import a file, it processes it, you get a transcript.
For the "hold a key and talk, text appears where my cursor is" workflow that most people mean when they say "dictation," MacWhisper isn't the right fit. There's no system-wide hotkey that lets you speak directly into any app. It's a great tool for a different use case.
Voiced
Voiced is a dictation app for Mac that runs 100% on-device using Apple's CoreML. No Siri, no iCloud, no cloud processing of any kind. Your audio never leaves your Mac.
The setup takes about a minute: download, grant microphone and accessibility permissions, and you're dictating. A ~150 MB transcription model downloads automatically on first launch. There's no model selection, no API keys, no configuration decisions to make.
What makes it work well as a Siri dictation replacement:
- No timeout. Hold your hotkey and talk for as long as you need. Pause to think. It keeps listening until you release the key.
- Smart Cleanup. Voiced automatically strips filler words — "um," "uh," "like," "you know" — and polishes your speech into clean, readable text. You speak naturally, the output reads like you typed it.
- Works everywhere. Because Voiced uses system-level accessibility, it works in any app with a text cursor. Mail, Slack, Google Docs, Notion, VS Code, Terminal — even AI coding tools like Claude Code and Cursor. No more "dictation not available" in the apps where you actually need it.
- 100% local. Zero audio leaves your machine. No account required. No telemetry. If privacy matters to you — and it should — this is the only option that guarantees it.
- One-time price. $40 once. No subscription, no recurring charges. That's less than four months of SuperWhisper.
How to switch from Siri dictation to Voiced
If you're currently using Apple's built-in dictation and want to switch, here's the process:
- Download Voiced from voicedhq.com and open it. The transcription model downloads automatically.
- Grant permissions. Voiced needs Microphone access (to hear you) and Accessibility access (to type text into your apps). macOS will prompt you for both.
- Optionally disable Apple Dictation. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation and toggle it off. This avoids conflicts with the system dictation shortcut. You can also just set a different hotkey in Voiced.
- Start talking. Hold your Voiced hotkey (customizable), speak naturally, release. Your transcribed text appears wherever your cursor is.
The whole setup takes under two minutes. There's nothing to configure, no model to choose, no account to create.
When you actually need Siri dictation
To be fair, Apple's built-in dictation still makes sense in a few specific cases: if you're on an older Intel Mac that can't run local Whisper models efficiently, if you only dictate a sentence at a time, or if you need dictation on iPhone/iPad where third-party options are limited. For everything else on a Mac — especially if you dictate more than a few sentences a day — a dedicated voice-to-text for Mac app is a meaningful upgrade.
The bottom line
Apple Dictation is a free built-in tool with built-in limitations. It times out, it doesn't clean up your speech, it sends some audio to Apple's servers, and it doesn't work in half the apps you actually use. You don't have to put up with that.
Voiced gives you fast, accurate, private dictation that works everywhere on your Mac — no Siri, no iCloud, no subscription. Just hold a key, speak, and get clean text. It's how dictation on Mac should have worked all along.