Best Local & Offline AI Dictation Software in 2026: Dictāta, Superwhisper, Rhino Voice and MacWhisper Compared

By Dictāta TeamNovember 2, 2026

Table of Contents

Cloud dictation sends your recorded voice to a remote server for transcription. Local (on-device) dictation runs the speech model on your own computer or phone, so transcription works without a connection and the audio is not uploaded.

This overview compares four tools that can transcribe on your device, and then covers the dictation built into macOS and Windows. It only states what we can source: our own measurements for Dictāta Local, and the vendors' public pages for the others. We did not benchmark the other tools ourselves, so there are no competitor latency or memory figures here.

Overview

Tool	Platforms	Where speech recognition runs	Source
Dictāta Local	Windows, macOS, Android	On the device (NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Streaming via sherpa-onnx)	dictata.app
Superwhisper	macOS, Windows, iOS, Android	Local models (Whisper free; Parakeet and Cohere Transcribe on Pro) or cloud models	superwhisper.com
Rhino Voice	macOS 14+, Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)	On the device (Whisper and Parakeet)	rhinovoice.app
MacWhisper	macOS	On the device (Whisper, Parakeet and other models); system-wide Dictation in the direct-download version only	macwhisper.com

The built-in options are covered after the table. Platform and pricing details change quickly. Check each vendor's site before deciding.

1. Dictāta Local

Platforms: Windows 10/11 (64-bit, x64 or ARM), macOS, Android.
Speech model: NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 ASR Streaming 0.6B (560 ms, INT8), ONNX export run by sherpa-onnx. About 475 MB download. 28 languages.
Included with: the Lifetime license, any paid Dictāta Cloud plan and the free trial.

How it works

Audio is captured as 16 kHz mono PCM in memory and fed to the model in 100 ms chunks while you speak. On desktop the model runs in a separate Electron utilityProcess, so the interface is not blocked by inference. Because the model is a streaming model, most of the recognition is finished by the time you release the hotkey.

Measured numbers

Metric	Value	Conditions
Stop-to-final text	~120–200 ms	Windows 11, Ryzen 7 5700U, 4 CPU threads, 33–59 s recordings replayed at real-time speed (122 ms and 126 ms). Model only, without pasting into the target app. We saw similar speed on a Mac with an M1 chip (macOS 26) and a Google Pixel 9a.
Model memory	~0.8 GB	Process working set on the same machine; independent of dictation length.
Real-time factor	~0.27	Built-in speed check after the download. Below 1 keeps up with live speech.

These figures come from a replayed recording, not a live microphone, and older or heavily loaded computers will be slower.

Features that work in Local mode

Dictation with paragraph breaks placed at pauses, and rule-based removal of fillers.
Smart Glossary hints: your glossary terms (up to 512) are passed to the decoder as hotwords with modified beam search. Manual text replacements still run afterwards.
Voice commands and history, including regenerating a saved recording on the same computer.
Optional local text models (Qwen2.5 1.5B, Qwen3.5 2B, Qwen3 4B, Gemma 4 E2B, 1.1–3.3 GB each) for prompts, Casual / Formal styles and text actions.

Known limits

Spoken numbers are written as words; converting them to digits is not supported yet.
Ask Dictāta chat, translation while dictating and Memory use Dictāta Cloud.
Android was tested on a Google Pixel 9a; minimum requirements are still being finalized during the preview.

Requirements

Windows or macOS with a 64-bit processor, at least 6 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended).
About 1.2 GB of free disk space for the one-time download and unpacking. Optional text models need more.
No GPU required.

What stays on the device

While Local mode is selected, audio and dictated text are not sent anywhere and usage analytics are blocked. The app denies all connections except sign-in and account details, billing pages you open, model downloads you start, the version check and feedback you send on purpose.

2. Superwhisper

Facts from the vendor's documentation and plans page:

Platforms: macOS, Windows, iOS and Android. The homepage notes that Intel Macs work best with cloud models and that offline models run well only on Apple Silicon.
Local models: local Whisper models are included in the free tier. The Parakeet and Cohere Transcribe local models are part of Pro.
Cloud models: available on Pro. Superwhisper states that it works offline with local voice models, while most AI formatting needs the internet.
Vocabulary: custom vocabulary and text replacements.
Pricing: $8.49 per month, $84.99 per year or $249.99 lifetime; every paid plan has the same features.
Enterprise: its enterprise page lists an on-device option, SAML 2.0 SSO with SCIM, model access controls and centralized billing.

The vendor publishes no latency or memory figures.

3. Rhino Voice

Facts from rhinovoice.app and its changelog:

Platform: macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon (M1 or newer). Intel Macs are not supported.
Speech models: Whisper and Parakeet, running on the Mac. Parakeet v2 is the recommended default for English; Parakeet v3 (25 European languages) and Whisper Large v3 Turbo are available for other languages.
Text cleanup: an on-device cleanup model, which the changelog describes as a roughly 1 GB download.
Network: the site states that audio, transcripts, history and cleanup stay on the Mac, and that the app only contacts the network for signed updates and for models you ask it to download. Dictation and cleanup work offline once the models are downloaded.
Pricing: free tier of 2,000 words per week after the first week; unlimited for a $20 one-time payment, per the vendor site.
Latency: the changelog reports internal benchmarks of its own (for example a 77-word dictation going from 1.3 s to 0.44 s) without stating the hardware, so they cannot be compared with our figures.

We also inspected the app bundle of version 0.1.40. It uses a FluidAudio / CoreML pipeline with live modes on Nemotron streaming and Parakeet models, Silero VAD, and text cleanup by Qwen2.5 1.5B through llama.cpp. This is our own analysis, not vendor documentation, and it may change between versions.

4. MacWhisper

Facts from macwhisper.com and its documentation:

Platform: macOS. It is sold in two editions: MacWhisper (direct download) and Whisper Transcription on the Mac App Store.
Models: transcribes locally with Whisper, Parakeet and other models; optional cloud AI providers are available.
Dictation: system-wide dictation into any text field is available only in the direct-download edition, according to the vendor's documentation. The App Store edition requires macOS 15.
Pricing: free tier; MacWhisper Pro is a one-time €64 license with lifetime updates.
Primary use: transcribing audio and video files.

Built-in operating system dictation

Both major desktop systems ship their own dictation. They need no extra app, which makes them a sensible baseline.

macOS Dictation

From Apple's Dictation guide:

Start it with the Microphone key, a Dictation keyboard shortcut you can customize, or Edit > Start Dictation.
You can dictate text of any length; it stops automatically after 30 seconds without speech.
Language and region availability varies; Apple lists it on its feature availability page.
System Settings > Keyboard > Dictation shows whether your voice input and transcripts for general text dictation are processed on the device or sent to Apple servers. Apple also asks whether you want to share audio recordings to improve Siri and Dictation, which you can change under Privacy & Security.
The guide has no section on adding custom vocabulary. On supported Macs with Apple Intelligence, it describes an on-device model that improves spelling, punctuation and capitalization (English, Macs with M3 or later and at least 12 GB of memory).

Windows

Voice typing (Windows key + H). From Microsoft's voice typing page:

It needs an internet connection and uses online speech recognition powered by Azure Speech services, so audio is sent to a cloud service.
It can only be started when the cursor is in a text box, and you can stop it with a voice command such as "Stop listening".

Voice access. From Microsoft's voice access page:

Voice access is available in Windows 11, version 22H2 and later, and replaces Windows Speech Recognition.
Microsoft states that it uses on-device speech recognition and works without an internet connection.
It is built for controlling the PC by voice as well as dictating text, and unlike voice typing it can be started at any time.

On-device vs hosted in Europe

Some dictation services, such as Sprecho and Fast Dictate, advertise servers in Europe. EU hosting is a data-residency choice, but audio is still uploaded to a server for transcription, and it needs an internet connection.

With on-device dictation, recognition happens on your computer. In Dictāta Local specifically, audio and dictated text go to no speech provider, and the network lock described above applies while the mode is on. Whether that meets your legal or professional obligations is for you or your compliance team to decide.

Choosing

Windows, Mac and Android with one streaming model: Dictāta Local.
Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, with custom modes and an enterprise offering: Superwhisper.
Apple Silicon Mac only, small on-device utility: Rhino Voice.
Transcribing audio and video files on a Mac: MacWhisper.
No extra software: macOS Dictation and Windows 11 voice access. Check what each does on your setup, because Apple's guide says availability varies by language and region.