You open your laptop on a cross-country flight. You have two hours of uninterrupted time and a document to write. You hold your dictation hotkey and start speaking — and nothing happens. Your dictation tool needs a server, and the plane has no Wi-Fi. Your voice-to-text just became useless at the exact moment you needed it most.
This is the core problem with cloud-based dictation. It works great until it does not. And the situations where it fails — planes, remote cabins, conference centers with locked-down networks, countries with spotty infrastructure — are often the situations where you most want to get work done by voice.
If you need voice-to-text on Mac with no internet, you have options. But they are not all equal. Here is what actually works offline, what half-works, and what gives you the most reliable experience when there is no connection at all.
Why you might need offline dictation
The obvious reason is travel. Planes, trains, hotel rooms with terrible Wi-Fi, coffee shops in cities where you do not have a data plan. If you travel for work — or just work from places that are not your desk — you have hit this wall before.
But connectivity is only one reason. There are others that matter just as much:
- Privacy and compliance. If you work in healthcare, law, government, or finance, sending voice recordings to a cloud server is a compliance risk. HIPAA, attorney-client privilege, classified environments — these are not theoretical concerns. Some workplaces ban cloud-based transcription entirely. For a deeper look at why this matters, read our guide on offline dictation on Mac and its privacy benefits.
- Restricted networks. Government buildings, hospitals, military installations, and many corporate offices run networks that block external API traffic. Your cloud dictation app cannot reach its server even though you technically have Wi-Fi.
- Unreliable connections. You do not need to be on a plane to lose your connection. Rural areas, developing countries, overloaded conference Wi-Fi, ISP outages — any of these turn cloud dictation into a loading spinner.
- Principle. Some people simply do not want their voice recordings leaving their machine. That is a legitimate preference and you should not need an internet connection to turn speech into text on a computer that is perfectly capable of doing it locally.
Option 1: Apple's built-in dictation
Apple Dictation on macOS can do some processing on-device, especially on Apple Silicon Macs. If you go to System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation, you can enable it and use it without an active internet connection for supported languages.
The catch: Apple's offline mode is limited. It handles short bursts reasonably well but struggles with longer dictation. There is an inactivity timeout that stops listening if you pause to think. Accuracy degrades on extended passages compared to the cloud-assisted mode. And the behavior is inconsistent — Apple does not make it entirely clear when processing is happening locally versus being sent to their servers. For users who need a dictation tool on Mac that does not rely on Siri, the built-in option often falls short.
If you only dictate a sentence or two at a time and your Mac has Apple Silicon, Apple Dictation will technically work offline. For anything longer or more demanding, it is not the answer.
Option 2: SuperWhisper in local mode
SuperWhisper is a third-party Mac app built on OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model. It offers a local mode that runs entirely on your Mac without sending audio to the cloud. The transcription quality with larger Whisper models is quite good.
The trade-offs: you need to choose which Whisper model size to use (tiny, small, medium, or large), and the larger models require more RAM and processing power. The app defaults to cloud mode, so you need to explicitly configure it for local-only operation. It is a subscription at $10/month or $100/year. And the setup — picking models, understanding the accuracy-versus-speed spectrum — is more involved than most people want to deal with.
If you are technical and willing to configure things, SuperWhisper's local mode is a solid offline option. But it is not simple, and it is not cheap over time. For a full breakdown of how it stacks up, see our comparison of the best voice-to-text apps for Mac.
Option 3: Voiced — fully local via CoreML
Voiced takes a different approach to offline dictation. Instead of running a Whisper model, it uses Apple's CoreML framework to run a speech recognition model natively on your Mac's Neural Engine. This is the same dedicated ML hardware that Apple built into every M-series chip — purpose-built for exactly this kind of on-device processing.
The practical result: voice-to-text on Mac with no internet, no configuration, and no compromise. Here is what that looks like:
- Works in airplane mode. There is no server component. The entire transcription pipeline runs on your Mac. Turn off Wi-Fi, disconnect from everything, and dictation works identically to when you are online.
- Nothing to configure. Voiced downloads a ~150 MB model on first launch and that is it. There is no model size selection, no local-versus-cloud toggle, no API keys. It is local by default and local only.
- No timeout. Hold your hotkey and talk for as long as you need. Pause to collect your thoughts. It keeps listening until you release the key.
- Automatic cleanup. Voiced strips filler words — "um," "uh," "you know" — and outputs clean, readable text. You speak naturally, and the text reads like you typed it carefully.
- Works in any app. Because it uses system-level accessibility to type text at your cursor position, Voiced works in Mail, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, VS Code, Terminal — anywhere you can place a text cursor.
- One-time purchase. $40 once, not a subscription. No recurring charges, no account required.
If your primary requirement is reliable voice-to-text on Mac without internet — something that just works every time you open your laptop, regardless of where you are — Voiced is the simplest path to get there. It is a local dictation app for Mac that treats offline as the default, not an afterthought.
How to set it up
Getting offline dictation running with Voiced takes about a minute:
- Download Voiced from voicedhq.com. The app is a standard Mac download — no App Store required.
- Open it and grant permissions. macOS will ask for Microphone access and Accessibility access. Both are required for Voiced to hear you and type text into your apps.
- Wait for the model download. On first launch, Voiced downloads the CoreML transcription model (~150 MB). This is the only time you need an internet connection. After that, everything is local forever.
- Start dictating. Hold your hotkey, speak, release. Text appears where your cursor is. On a plane, in a cabin, in a classified facility — it does not matter. If your Mac is open, it works.
The bottom line
Voice-to-text on Mac without internet is no longer a niche requirement. Remote work, travel, privacy regulations, and unreliable infrastructure make offline dictation a practical necessity for a growing number of people. Apple's built-in option gets you partway there but with real limitations. SuperWhisper offers a capable local mode for users willing to configure it and pay monthly. Voiced gives you fully local, fully offline dictation with zero setup and a one-time price.
Your laptop has the hardware to transcribe your voice locally. You should not need someone else's server to turn speech into text. Pick the tool that matches how you work — and stop depending on a connection you might not have.