Offline speech to text on a Mac

Published 10 October 2026

Offline speech to text means the recognition model runs on your Mac. You can dictate on a plane or with Wi-Fi off, and your audio doesn't go to a server. On a Mac there are two kinds of options: the dictation built into macOS and apps that run OpenAI's Whisper model locally. Both share one catch. The model has to be on your Mac before you go offline.

Apple's on-device dictation

Apple's current Mac User Guide doesn't make a blanket promise. It asks you to look at the text under Dictation in System Settings → Keyboard, which tells you whether general dictation, such as messages and notes, is processed on your Mac and not sent to Apple's servers. Dictating into a search box is excluded.

The macOS Ventura edition of the same guide put it more directly. On a Mac with Apple silicon, dictation is processed on the device in many languages and needs no internet connection, while text dictated into a search box may be sent to the search provider.

Apple's feature availability page lists the languages with on-device dictation, among them many English variants plus German, French, Spanish, Japanese and Russian, and notes that they need a speech model download. Apple's privacy page adds that when dictation isn't processed on the device, what you say goes to Apple's servers and isn't stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri & Dictation.

In practice, turn Dictation on, add your language, give the model time to download, then read the line under Dictation.

Whisper apps that run locally

Whisper is OpenAI's open speech recognition model. Projects like whisper.cpp run it on a Mac's GPU, and several dictation apps are built on it. Superwhisper's free plan uses local Whisper models. VoiceInk is open source and runs whisper.cpp or Parakeet locally. MacWhisper runs models on your Mac too, though it's built mainly for transcribing files and its system-wide dictation is a Pro feature. Saypad also runs Whisper on the Mac. The free dictation apps compared covers what each one includes.

Whisper picks up the language by itself and writes punctuation and capitals, which helps when you switch between languages.

What "offline" really means

An app that runs locally isn't necessarily ready to work offline the moment you install it. On 7 October 2026 we unpacked the installers of eight Mac dictation apps. Only Saypad's contained a speech model, and every other app needed the cloud or a model download before its first dictation. That's fine at home, but it's a surprise on a train with no signal. The details are in what's inside eight dictation app installers.

So whichever tool you pick, download the model you want while you still have a connection, then turn Wi-Fi off and dictate a paragraph into Notes. If text appears, you're set.

Small model or large model

Model size is the trade-off. In our test of 32 real dictations, the 8-bit large-v3-turbo (874 MB) gave the same text as the full 1.6 GB model in 31 of them. The small model (190 MB) is much faster but changed roughly one word in five. For quick notes the small one is fine. Longer text, names and technical terms need the large one.

How Saypad handles it

Saypad's 187 MB installer includes the small Whisper model, so you can dictate offline right after installing. The 8-bit large-v3-turbo then downloads in the background over Wi-Fi, and Saypad switches to it when it's ready. On macOS 26 you can also choose Apple's on-device SpeechAnalyzer engine. On an M4 Pro, a 7.6-second sentence appears about 1.2 seconds after you let go of the key.

Questions

Does Apple's dictation work offline?

In many languages, once the speech model is downloaded. Apple's feature availability page lists the languages with on-device dictation and notes that they require a speech model download. The text under Dictation in Keyboard settings shows whether your setup processes general dictation on the Mac.

How big are offline speech models?

For Whisper, Saypad's small model is 190 MB, the 8-bit large-v3-turbo is 874 MB and the full large-v3-turbo is 1.6 GB. Other apps offer their own choice of models and sizes.

Is offline dictation less accurate than cloud dictation?

We haven't compared against cloud services, so we won't claim either way. Our accuracy test shows how much the model size matters on a Mac.

Does Saypad ever go online?

Only to download the larger model, check for updates and send anonymous usage counts with no ID and no text, which you can turn off. Audio and text never leave your Mac.