Speech to Text Mac Guide: How to Dictate on a Mac
To use speech to text on a Mac, turn on Dictation in System Settings → Keyboard, put your cursor where you want the words, and press the Microphone key or your Dictation shortcut. Talk, and the text appears in whatever app you're in. It's free, built into macOS, and works in most text fields.
Apple calls the feature Dictation. This speech to text Mac guide covers the setup, the shortcut, and how to tell whether your speech stays on your Mac or goes to Apple's servers. Languages, voice commands, the limits you'll hit and what to look for in a third-party voice to text app come after that, with fixes at the end. Menu paths follow Apple's Mac User Guide for macOS 27, the current version as of October 2026.
How to turn on Dictation on Mac
- Choose Apple menu → System Settings.
- Click Keyboard in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down.
- Go to Dictation and turn it on.
- Click Enable when macOS asks.
That's the whole setup: no download and no account.
You may then be asked whether to share audio recordings to help improve Siri and Dictation. Click Share Audio Recordings or Not Now. You can change your mind later under System Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements, using the Improve Siri & Dictation switch.
How to dictate on Mac
Click where you want the text to go. Then do one of these:
- Press the Microphone key, if your keyboard has one in the function row. Press and release it; pressing and holding it starts Siri instead.
- Use your Dictation keyboard shortcut (more on that below).
- Choose Edit → Start Dictation from the menu bar. It's slower, but it's useful for checking whether a broken shortcut is the real problem.
When the cursor highlights and pulses, or you hear the ready tone, start talking. To finish, press Escape, the Microphone key, or the shortcut again.
Dictation is system-wide, so it types into most places you can put a text cursor: Mail and Messages, Notes and Pages, Word, Slack, Gmail or Google Docs in a browser, and even Terminal. If a particular app won't take it, try Edit → Start Dictation in that app before assuming Dictation is broken.
On a Mac with Apple silicon you don't need to stop dictating to type. The cursor stops pulsing while you type and picks up again when you stop, so you can fix a misheard word with the keyboard and keep talking without restarting the session.
Apple says there's no timeout on how long you dictate. What does happen is that Dictation stops itself when it hears no speech for 30 seconds, so a long think ends the session.
Changing the keyboard shortcut
Go to System Settings → Keyboard, find Dictation, and open the Shortcut menu. Pick one of the presets, or choose Customize and press the keys you want; Apple's example is Option-Z.
One side effect is worth knowing about. Pick "Press Fn (Function) Key Twice" as the Dictation shortcut, and macOS changes the "Press fn key to" option in Keyboard settings to match. If your fn key suddenly behaves differently, that's probably why.
On-device or Apple's servers?
This is the setting people ask about most, and the honest answer is that it depends on your Mac and your language.
Apple's current instruction is to look in System Settings → Keyboard, under Dictation, where macOS shows a line of text telling you whether general dictation is processed on your device and not sent to Siri servers, or whether you need an internet connection. Dictation has to be turned on for that text to appear.
As a rule of thumb from Apple's own documentation: on a Mac with Apple silicon, general text dictation such as messages and notes is processed on the device in many languages, with no internet connection needed. Dictating into a search box uses Apple's servers. On an Intel Mac, or in a language without on-device support, your speech is sent to Apple to process, which also means you need a connection.
If privacy is the reason you're asking, check that line under Dictation for the languages you actually use.
Dictation languages
Go to System Settings → Keyboard, find Dictation, and click Edit next to Languages. Tick each language and region you dictate in.
With more than one language set up, you can switch while dictating by clicking the language abbreviation next to the cursor. If your keyboard has a Globe key, press it and choose a language.
Not every language supports every feature. Apple keeps the full list, including which languages get auto-punctuation and on-device processing, on its macOS Feature Availability page.
Choosing the microphone
Under Dictation in Keyboard settings there's a Microphone source menu. It shows which mic your Mac is listening with. Automatic lets macOS pick the one you're most likely to use, which isn't always the one you want once AirPods or a webcam are connected. Choose the mic by name if dictation keeps hearing the wrong thing. To see which mic is actually picking you up, and how loud it is, run our free mic test in your browser.
Dictation commands worth learning
You don't need many commands. These are the ones you'll actually say, all from Apple's list of dictation commands for Mac. Saying "comma" and "period" feels odd for a day or two, then it becomes habit and saves a lot of editing.
Punctuation
| Say this | You get |
|---|---|
| "period" or "full stop" | . |
| "comma" | , |
| "question mark" | ? |
| "exclamation mark" or "exclamation point" | ! |
| "colon" | : |
| "semicolon" | ; |
| "quote" and "end quote" | quotation marks |
| "open parenthesis" and "close parenthesis" | brackets |
| "hyphen" | - |
| "ellipsis" | three dots |
Formatting
| Say this | What happens |
|---|---|
| "new line" | Starts a new line |
| "new paragraph" | Starts a new paragraph |
| "caps on" / "caps off" | Puts the next phrase in Title Case, then stops |
| "all caps" | Makes the next word ALL CAPS |
| "no space on" / "no space off" | Joins the next phrase without spaces, then resumes |
| "numeral" | Formats the next phrase as a number |
You can also say the name of an emoji, like "heart emoji", in supported languages. There are no voice commands for bold, italics or headings in standard Dictation.
Auto-punctuation
In supported languages, Dictation adds commas, periods and question marks by itself as you talk. It's on by default. To turn it off, go to System Settings → Keyboard, find Dictation, and switch off Auto-punctuation. You might do that if you prefer to say every comma yourself, which some people find more predictable for long documents.
Voice Control vs. Dictation
Apple has two voice features and they get mixed up all the time.
Dictation turns speech into text. That's all it does.
Voice Control, in System Settings → Accessibility → Voice Control, lets you run the whole Mac by voice: clicking, scrolling, opening apps and dictating. When Voice Control is on, standard macOS Dictation isn't available and you dictate through Voice Control instead. If your Dictation shortcut has stopped working and you recently tried Voice Control, that's the first thing to check.
Where Apple's Dictation falls short
Apple's Dictation is good enough for messages, notes and the odd email. Use it for hours a day and a few things start to grate.
It stops after 30 seconds of silence. That's fine for a text message and annoying when you're drafting something and stop to think. You reach for the shortcut again and lose the thread.
Accuracy is fine rather than great. Zapier's testing found about 11 wrong words in a 200-word passage. On a 500-word email, that's a couple of dozen words to find and fix, scattered through the text. Homophones ("their", "there", "they're") and proper nouns are the usual casualties.
There's no personal dictionary. Product names, colleagues' surnames and technical terms get the same wrong spelling every time, and you fix them by hand.
There's no clean-up either. What you say is what you get: filler words, false starts and all.
It's toggle-based. You press to start and press again to stop, with no push-to-talk where you hold a key while speaking, and no mode that listens and starts typing when you talk.
And it's tied to your settings in ways that can surprise you. Search boxes go to Apple's servers, some languages aren't processed on the device, and Voice Control quietly replaces it.
Is voice to text on a Mac worth it?
For most people who write a lot, yes. A Stanford study found speech input ran at 161 words per minute against 53 on a phone's touchscreen keyboard, roughly three times as fast. A physical keyboard narrows that gap, but talking still tends to beat typing for first drafts, long emails and replies. Our free speaking speed test measures your own words per minute in under a minute.
Writers feel it first, because they think in paragraphs and type in sentences. Developers use dictation for documentation, commit messages and prompts to AI coding tools. Lawyers and clinicians dictate notes between appointments rather than typing them up at night. And if typing hurts, through wrist pain or RSI, dictation is less a shortcut and more a way to keep working. Our guides to wrist pain from typing and hands-free typing software go further on that.
The other thing that changed is the hardware. The Neural Engine in Apple silicon Macs can run speech models like Whisper and Parakeet on the machine itself, so a good voice to text app no longer has to send your audio to a server to be fast.
What to look for in a voice to text app for Mac
If built-in Dictation isn't enough, four things separate an app you'll keep using from one you'll uninstall in a week.
On-device or cloud
Cloud apps send your audio to a server. They can be accurate and some do clever formatting, but they need a connection, add a round trip, and your words pass through someone else's infrastructure. On-device apps process speech on your Mac, work offline and keep the audio local. If you dictate client work, health details or proprietary code, that matters more than any feature list.
Where it types
Some apps transcribe into their own window, and you copy the text out. That's fine for recordings and a pain for live dictation. The ones worth using are system-wide: press or hold a key, speak, and the text appears wherever your cursor is, whether that's email, Slack, Google Docs or a code editor.
Vocabulary
Accuracy comes down to the speech model, your microphone and your accent. The bigger difference in practice is how an app handles your words: medical terms, legal phrases, product names, people's names. Look for a personal dictionary or custom vocabulary.
How you pay
Mac dictation apps are sold three ways: subscriptions, one-off purchases, and free or open-source. Subscriptions add up over years. One-off purchases are good value if the app fits. Free and open-source apps vary in polish, but with open source you can at least read the code and see what happens to your audio.
Voice to text apps for Mac beyond Dictation
Here's how the main options compare on how they work. Prices and the full ranking are in our guide to the best dictation apps for Mac.
| App | Processing | Types where your cursor is? | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Dictation | On-device (Apple silicon, many languages) | Yes | Quick messages and notes |
| Blazing Transcribe (ours) | On-device | Yes | Push-to-talk dictation all day |
| Superwhisper | On-device (Whisper) | Yes | Custom modes and lots of settings |
| Wispr Flow | Cloud | Yes | AI-polished, tone-matched text |
| VoiceInk | On-device (Whisper), open source | Yes | Reading the code yourself |
| Spokenly | On-device (Whisper and Parakeet) | Less smoothly than paid apps | Offline transcription on a budget |
| MacWhisper | On-device (Whisper) | No, its own window | Transcribing recordings |
A few notes from the table. Wispr Flow reformats what you say into tidier text and adjusts tone to the app, which is great until it rewrites something you meant verbatim. Superwhisper gives you different modes and prompts for different jobs, at the cost of a steeper learning curve; see our Superwhisper review. MacWhisper is a transcription tool rather than a dictation tool, covered in our MacWhisper review.
If you're looking for Dragon: Nuance discontinued Dragon for Mac, and there's no current macOS version. Our Dragon alternatives guide covers what former users switched to.
Where Blazing Transcribe fits
We make Blazing Transcribe. This is ours, so weigh that accordingly. It's a free, open-source dictation app for Mac. Hold fn, speak, let go, and your words appear in whatever app has your cursor, from Slack to a terminal. There's also a hands-free toggle mode and an always-listening mode if you'd rather not hold a key.
It runs 100% on-device, so your voice never leaves your Mac, and it transcribes at 155× faster than real time. You can add names and jargon to its personal dictionary, and a History view keeps your past dictations on your Mac. Optional text cleanup removes filler words and fixes punctuation. There's no account, trial or card.
The limits: it needs macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon (M1 or newer), it's Mac only, and it doesn't transcribe meetings or audio files. If you also use Apple's Dictation on fn, Blazing has a single switch to stop using the fn key.
Fixing common Dictation problems
Apple's troubleshooting page for Mac Dictation boils down to these checks.
Dictation won't start
- Make sure Dictation is on in System Settings → Keyboard.
- Check the language and region are right, under Edit next to Languages.
- Confirm you're using the shortcut that's actually set, or try Edit → Start Dictation.
- If Voice Control is on, turn it off.
It doesn't hear you
Go to System Settings → Sound → Input, select your mic, and raise the input volume. On a Mac without a built-in mic, an external one has to be connected and selected. Make sure clothing or your hand isn't covering the built-in mic on a laptop, and if the room is noisy or echoey, a headset mic will do better.
It needs the internet
Depending on your Mac and language, you may need a connection. The text under Dictation in Keyboard settings tells you which applies. Check your network in System Settings → Network.
The fn key does nothing
Look at the "Press fn key to" option in Keyboard settings and the Dictation Shortcut menu. Some other apps use fn as well. If you run a dictation app that also uses fn, change one of them so they don't fight. There's a longer list of fixes in our guide to speech to text not working.
Tips for better speech to text results
These apply to Apple's Dictation and to any other tool.
Use a decent microphone if you dictate often. A laptop's built-in mic also hears the keyboard, the fan and the room. A headset, or AirPods, puts the mic near your mouth, which matters more than how much it cost.
Speak in whole thoughts. Speech models use context to pick words, and a sentence broken by a long pause gives them less to go on.
Dictate first and edit after. Stopping to fix every mistake breaks your flow, and you tend to start speaking in a stilted way that makes accuracy worse. Get the whole draft down, then do one editing pass with the keyboard.
Cut background noise where you can: shut the door, turn off the TV, move away from the kitchen. A quiet room helps more than switching apps.
Talk naturally. Over-enunciating like a robot doesn't help, because modern speech models learn from ordinary speech.
If you're on a Mac and want push-to-talk in every app, Blazing Transcribe is free to try.
FAQ
Is Mac speech to text free?
Yes, speech to text on a Mac is free. Dictation is built into macOS at no cost and works in most text fields across the system.
Does Mac Dictation work offline?
Often, yes. On a Mac with Apple silicon, general dictation is processed on the device in many languages without an internet connection. Intel Macs and some languages need a connection, and dictating into a search box goes through Apple's servers. The text under Dictation in Keyboard settings tells you what your Mac does.
What is the shortcut for Dictation on Mac?
Press the Microphone key if your keyboard has one. Otherwise, use the shortcut shown in System Settings → Keyboard under Dictation, where you can pick a preset such as pressing fn twice or set your own. Edit → Start Dictation in the menu bar also works.
Why does Mac Dictation keep stopping?
Mac Dictation keeps stopping because it ends automatically after 30 seconds with no speech; there's no limit on length. Turning on Voice Control also replaces standard Dictation, which can look like it has stopped working.
How do I dictate punctuation on Mac?
To dictate punctuation on a Mac, say the name of the mark, like "comma", "period" or "question mark". Say "new line" or "new paragraph" for breaks. In supported languages, auto-punctuation adds commas, periods and question marks for you.
Can I use voice to text in any app on Mac?
Mostly, yes: you can use voice to text in almost any app on a Mac. Apple's Dictation and system-wide apps such as Blazing Transcribe, Superwhisper and Wispr Flow type into whatever app has your cursor. Transcription tools like MacWhisper work in their own window, so you copy the text out.
What's the best speech to text Mac app if you dictate all day?
A system-wide app with push-to-talk and a personal dictionary, ideally on-device. Apple's Dictation is fine for short bursts; for heavier use, compare the options in our guide to the best dictation apps for Mac.