Best Free Dictation Apps for Mac in 2026

01Free always comes with a limit

Free dictation apps come in four shapes, and the shape tells you more than the price tag:

• Built in. Apple Dictation costs nothing because it ships with macOS. The limit is what it does not do: no AI clean-up, no custom vocabulary.
• Freemium with a meter. Shepit, Wispr Flow and Aqua Voice give you the full product and count your minutes or words.
• Freemium with a feature wall. Superwhisper and MacWhisper let you dictate as much as you like with local models and keep the better models and AI features for paying users.
• Open source. Handy, Buzz and VoiceInk publish their code. You pay with setup time and with your Mac's processor, because the speech model runs on it.

None of these is a trick. Knowing which shape you are signing up for just saves you the surprise on day ten.

02Apple Dictation: free and unmetered

Apple Dictation is the honest baseline. Turn it on in System Settings, under Keyboard, press the Globe (Fn) key twice and speak. There is no timeout: it keeps going until you stop or stay silent for 30 seconds. It adds commas and periods automatically in supported languages, and for 48 of the 63 language and region variants Apple lists, the speech model runs on your Mac after a one-time download.

Two limits show up as soon as you dictate more than a few sentences. There is no clean-up pass, so what you say is what lands, including every false start. And Dictation has no custom vocabulary: product names, colleagues' surnames and technical terms come out however the model guesses them. Voice Control, an accessibility feature, does have a vocabulary list, but it is a different tool with a different workflow.

One more thing if privacy is why you chose it: some languages, Ukrainian and Polish among them, are not on the on-device list, so that audio goes to Apple's servers. Keyboard settings show which case you are in. For how Apple's tool stacks up against paid apps, see Best Dictation Apps for Mac in 2026.

03Shepit Free: 30 minutes with AI clean-up

Disclosure: Shepit is our app, and I am its product manager.

Shepit Free is the same app as the paid plans, with a meter: 30 minutes of dictation a month, fresh every month, no card. Hold a key (Right Shift by default), speak, release, and the text lands at your cursor in any Mac app. The free plan includes the optional AI clean-up pass, which adds punctuation, fixes misheard words and smooths out self-corrections. It is off by default, you switch it on per app, and it keeps your words: it does not translate and it is not a filler-word remover.

Thirty minutes sounds small until you turn it into words.

04Superwhisper and MacWhisper: free local, paid extras

Superwhisper and MacWhisper take the opposite approach to a meter. Both run Whisper speech models on your Mac, and on the free tier you can use those models as much as you like, offline.

Superwhisper gives new users 3,000 words of every Pro feature, then drops to the free plan: unlimited local Whisper models, 100+ languages, dictation into any app. Behind the Pro price ($8.49 a month, $84.99 a year or $249.99 lifetime) stay the cloud speech models, the AI language models that rewrite your text, your own API keys and file transcription. So free Superwhisper is a capable local dictation app without the clever part. Superwhisper itself says its local models run well only on Apple silicon, and the bigger the model, the harder your Mac works.

MacWhisper is free forever for recording, file transcription, subtitle export and basic system-wide dictation. The Pro licence, a one-time payment of about €65, adds higher-quality dictation, AI prompts and grammar fixes, speaker recognition and batch work. Its heart is still transcribing recordings rather than live typing, which matters if you mostly dictate into Slack or email.

If the local route appeals, I compare these apps on privacy and accuracy in Best Offline and Private Dictation Apps for Mac, and Superwhisper against everything else in Best Superwhisper Alternatives.

05Open source: Handy, Buzz and VoiceInk

Open-source apps are the only option with no meter and no feature wall. You download a speech model once and everything runs on your Mac.

• Handy (MIT licence) is the closest thing to a free, open-source dictation app: hold a shortcut, speak, and it pastes the text into the active app. It runs Whisper or Parakeet models locally and works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
• Buzz (MIT licence) is a transcription tool: audio files, YouTube links and live microphone transcription into its own window. It does not type into other apps, so it is a recorder, not a keyboard replacement. Recent versions need Apple silicon.
• VoiceInk (GPL-3.0) is open source, but the ready-made app is paid: a one-time licence from $25 after a 7-day trial. You can build it from source for free if you are comfortable with Xcode. Its AI enhancement needs your own API key or its on-device option.

What you give up is polish and support. Nobody tunes these apps for your microphone or answers your email when an update breaks a hotkey. For a developer who likes tinkering, that is a feature. For everyone else, it is the hidden price.

06Google Docs voice typing

If you write in Google Docs, you already have free voice typing: Tools, then Voice typing, click the microphone and speak. It supports over a hundred language variants, Ukrainian included, and works in recent Chrome, Edge and Safari. Voice commands for punctuation and formatting work in English only.

The limit is the walls of the document. Voice typing works in Google Docs and in Slides speaker notes, nowhere else. You cannot use it to answer an email or prompt Claude Code, and the text arrives without clean-up. For a long draft in one doc it is perfectly good. For dictation across your day it is a detour: you dictate in Docs, then copy the text to where it belongs.

07When free is enough, and when $4.99 pays off

Free is enough if you dictate short things a few times a day, or mostly in one place: Apple Dictation for quick messages, Google Docs for drafts, a local Whisper app if you want privacy and do not mind raw output.

Free stops being enough when editing starts eating the time you saved. Raw dictation of a long email still needs a pass for punctuation, the misheard name and the sentence you restarted halfway. That is the job of the AI clean-up step, and in most apps it is the first thing behind the paywall.

The meters also differ more than the headlines suggest. Wispr Flow's free plan allows 2,000 words a week on desktop, roughly twice what Shepit Free gives over a month. Superwhisper's 3,000 Pro words are a one-time trial. Aqua Voice starts you with 1,000 free words.

On Shepit, Basic is $4.99 a month plus tax (the price varies by country) for 10 hours, twenty times the free allowance. If you dictate more than about seven minutes a week, you will run out of free minutes before the month ends, and that is where I would start paying. All plans are on the pricing page.

08Which one fits you

• Zero cost forever, short messages: Apple Dictation.
• AI clean-up, and you want to know if dictation sticks: Shepit Free. Download Shepit and use it for a week of real messages.
• Unlimited and offline, raw text is fine: Superwhisper's free tier or Handy.
• Recordings, not live speech: MacWhisper Free or Buzz.
• Long drafts that live in Google Docs: Docs voice typing.
• An hour of dictation a day: no free tier will hold you. Compare the paid plans in Best Dictation Apps for Mac in 2026.