Dictami runs the recognition model directly on your Mac. No audio is sent anywhere. No connection is needed — not when you set it up, and not when you use it. It works on a plane the same way it works at your desk.
Cloud-based dictation apps — including Apple's own built-in dictation in older macOS versions — send your audio to a remote server to be transcribed. That means they fail silently on a slow connection, produce delays on a fast one, and stop working entirely with no signal at all.
The reason they do this is that running a good speech recognition model used to require more computing power than a laptop had. Apple Silicon changed that. The Neural Engine in every M-series Mac can run the Whisper model in real time, locally, with no server involved.
When you download a language model in Settings, it's stored on your Mac. After that, the internet is never involved again — not for recognition, not for license checks, not for anything. The model loads into memory when the app starts, stays there, and processes your audio the instant you release the key.
On a plane. In a train. In a hotel with unreliable Wi-Fi. In a building with poor signal. At a coffee shop where you don't trust the network. Anywhere you have your Mac and want to dictate — it works the same way.
It's also useful for sensitive content. If you're dictating notes that you don't want to pass through someone else's servers, running entirely offline means they never do.
Because there's no network in the loop, speed doesn't vary with your connection. A typical sentence is ready in about a third of a second whether you're on gigabit fiber or on airplane mode.
Every supported language runs on-device: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and more. Automatic punctuation and capitalization work in all of them, offline.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later on an Apple Silicon Mac — an M1 or newer. The model downloads once from Settings (a few minutes on a normal connection). After that, no internet is ever needed. No account, no sign-up, no subscription required to try it.
7-day trial inside the app. No card, no account.
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