Private dictation means your voice stays on your Mac.

What you actually dictate

Dictation is rarely small talk. It is the email to a client, the note after a medical appointment, the draft of a contract, the message you rewrote three times before sending. With cloud dictation, every one of those passes through a company's servers as audio, and what happens to it next is a matter of policy — a policy that can change.

How Dictami keeps it local

The recognition model lives on your Mac and runs on its Apple Silicon chip. When you hold the key and speak, the audio goes from the microphone to that model and nowhere else. The text it produces is typed into the app you are using, the same as if you had typed it yourself.

The model is downloaded once, from Settings. After that the app does not need the internet to dictate at all.

A claim you can check

"We respect your privacy" is a sentence anyone can write. "It works with the network off" is one you can test in ten seconds. Turn off Wi-Fi, unplug the cable, and dictate a paragraph. If the text still appears, nothing was sent anywhere — there was nowhere to send it.

No account, no profile

There is no sign-up to try Dictami and none to buy it. No email address is required for the trial, and no profile is built around your usage. A license key arrives after purchase, you paste it in once, and it is checked once.

The privacy policy lists exactly what the app stores on your Mac and what it never collects.

Private does not mean slow

Local used to mean waiting. On Apple Silicon it does not: text appears about half a second after you release the key, with punctuation added, in any of 30 languages. There is no round trip to a server, so a weak connection never makes it slower. For more on running without a network, see offline dictation.

What you need

macOS 14 Sonoma or later on an Apple Silicon Mac — an M1 or newer. Intel Macs are not supported. The trial runs for seven days inside the app, with no card and no account.