Offline speech to text on a Mac.

Two different things get called “offline”, and the difference is the whole question. Written for macOS 26.

The two meanings, separated

On-device means the audio is turned into text by your own machine. No recording is uploaded. This is a privacy property.

Works without a network means the feature keeps functioning with the Wi-Fi off. This is an availability property.

They usually go together, but not always: an app can transcribe on your Mac and still need a connection for something else, like signing in or syncing settings. When you are comparing tools, the question worth asking is the first one — whether a recording ever leaves — because that is the one you cannot verify later.

How to make macOS dictate on device

Apple’s built-in Dictation can run on your Mac rather than through Apple’s servers, for the languages that support it. Open System Settings → Keyboard, find the Dictation section, and make sure your language is downloaded rather than pending — an on-device language pack has to be fetched once before anything can run locally.

macOS keeps a preference for using only offline dictation. With it set, dictation stops silently falling back to the server when the on-device path is unavailable, which is what makes the behaviour predictable instead of dependent on your connection.

How to tell which one you are getting

Turn the Wi-Fi off and dictate a sentence. If the words appear, that path is running on your Mac. If nothing happens, it was going somewhere. It is a cruder test than reading a privacy policy and a considerably more reliable one.

Why it is worth caring about

• The recording is the sensitive part. A transcript can be redacted afterwards; audio of you saying a client’s name, a password, or a diagnosis cannot be un-sent.
• It works where you actually are. Planes, trains, hotel Wi-Fi and corporate proxies all break a cloud round-trip, and they break it at the moment you most want to dictate rather than type.
• Nothing to retain. If no recording ever reaches a server, there is no retention setting to configure there and nothing to ask anyone to delete later.
• Latency is local. Nothing waits for a round-trip.

Where the built-in one stops

On-device dictation covers the languages Apple has shipped packs for, and it ends on a pause — a short one — which is why long-form dictation with it tends to stop mid-thought. It is also configured per-Mac: whatever it has learned about your vocabulary does not follow you.

Where Uttrflow sits

This is our product, so read it with that in mind. Uttrflow transcribes on your Mac: no recording is uploaded, and the audio is deleted the moment it becomes text — kept on the Mac for a day only if it couldn’t be, so you can retry. On the availability question, the honest answer is the network exactly once — you sign in on first run, and after that dictation runs whether you are online or not. It needs an Apple-silicon Mac on macOS 26 or later.

It also keeps a personal dictionary, so the names and jargon you correct once stay corrected, and a searchable clipboard history that stays on that Mac and clears every seven days by default.

Download it for macOS, or if dictation has stopped working entirely, start with the troubleshooting guide.