Dictano

Dictano is a dictation app for Mac that never sends your voice anywhere. Press Option+Space, speak, and the text appears at your cursor, in whatever app you were already typing in. The transcription runs on your own machine. A Whisper model lives in the app and does the work locally, which means it keeps working on a plane, in a waiting room, or anywhere the wifi is bad, and no audio of yours is ever uploaded to be processed on someone else's servers. For anyone dictating notes about clients, patients or cases, that is the difference between a convenience and a liability. It sits in the menu bar with no window to manage. Tap the shortcut to toggle, or hold it to talk and release to stop, whichever fits the sentence. The shortcut is configurable, the last ten dictations stay in the menu so you can copy one back, and it will not steal your clipboard: whatever you had copied is handed back after the paste. It speaks English, Spanish, German, Portuguese and French, and it can detect the language on its own. One payment, no subscription. Most of the alternatives charge every month for the same thing, and several of them are wrappers around an API that sees everything you say. Apple Silicon only. Seven day trial, then twenty nine dollars once.