Dictami runs OpenAI's Whisper model locally on Apple Silicon — and, for most languages, something faster. Whisper is the safety net that covers everything else, so no language is ever left without recognition.
Whisper is an open speech recognition model from OpenAI, and its strength is breadth. It handles around a hundred languages, copes with accents and background noise better than most, and can be run entirely offline. That last part is why it became the foundation for local dictation on the Mac.
Its weakness is speed. Whisper processes a recording after you finish speaking, and the larger models — the ones accurate enough to be worth using — take noticeably longer than the sentence took to say.
For the languages most people dictate in, faster models exist and they are genuinely better. Dictami ships three of them: a specialist for Russian, one covering 25 European languages including English, and one for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. Each is several times quicker than Whisper on the same audio, and each adds punctuation on its own.
The app picks for you. Choose your speech language and it uses the best model installed for it — a specialist ahead of a general one — and tells you in Settings which one is recommended for your language.
Whisper covers everything the fast models don't. Pick a language outside their range and Dictami falls back to Whisper automatically — slower, but working, rather than an error message. It's the difference between a tool that supports 30 languages well and one that supports 30 languages only.
Whichever model runs, it runs on your Mac. No audio is uploaded, no account is needed, and no internet connection is required after the first download. On a plane, on a train, or with the Wi-Fi off, the behavior is identical.
macOS 14 Sonoma or later on an Apple Silicon Mac — an M1 or newer. Intel Macs aren't supported: the runtime targets the Neural Engine, which is what makes local recognition fast enough to be worth using.
Models download from Settings with one click. Keep as many as you like, or delete the ones you don't use.
7-day trial inside the app. No card, no account.
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