Guide
Dictate offline and without limits
One download turns dictation into something that runs on your own machine — free and unlimited on every plan, working on a plane, and with nothing about your voice going anywhere.
Turn it on
- Open Settings → Dictation.
- Choose This Mac and start the download — 632 MB, once.
- Dictate exactly as before. Nothing else changes.
Where this saves you
- On a plane or a train. No connection needed, so the words still land at your cursor.
- When you dictate all day. It is unlimited on every plan, including the free one — nothing to run out of.
- Anything confidential. Medical notes, legal drafts, an unannounced product: the recording is recognised on the machine it was made on.
- Hotel and café wifi. The kind with a login page that breaks everything else.
Good to know
Translating a selection, the actions and spoken requests still need a connection — those run on a model too big to keep on a laptop. Dictating in one language and typing in another is a translation too, so that half goes online as well.
You can switch back to the cloud at any time in the same setting, and back again after that. The download stays on disk, so it is instant.