Free dictation apps for Mac
Free, untilsixteen minutes in.
Every dictation app has a free tier and no two of them mean the same thing. One is capped in words a week, one in minutes a week, one in words you only ever get once, one in how good the model is allowed to be. So we converted all of them into the one unit you can feel: minutes of talking.
The direct answer
If you want free forever, the best free dictation app for a Mac is the Dictation already built into it. Apple's own guide says you can dictate text of any length without a timeout, and it costs nothing. If you want the cleanup pass free as well, Google's Eloquent does it on your Mac with no cap, in English only. Among the paid tools, the largest genuinely free tier is Superwhisper's, which runs Whisper on your Mac without a cap. The cloud free tiers are trials: Wispr Flow gives you about 16 minutes of talking a week, AI Dictation about 40 minutes once, Aqua Voice about 8 minutes once.
One unit, twelve tools
What each free tier is, in minutes of talking
The last column is the only number on this page we produced ourselves. Speech runs at roughly 126 words a minute: that is not a figure we found somewhere, it is the rate across 186 real dictations in Sonira, 3,523 words over 28 minutes of speech, and it sits inside the 120 to 150 range everyone quotes. Divide a word cap by it and a free tier stops being a marketing number and becomes a length of time.
| Tool | What free means here | The cap, in their words | In minutes of talking |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apple Dictation | Free, and not a tier. It is part of macOS. | Apple's Mac User Guide: "You can dictate text of any length without a timeout." No allowance, no word limit, no subscription appears anywhere in it. | Unlimited. Nothing to install and no account, since it ships with macOS. |
| Google AI Edge Eloquent | Free, and not a tier either. Google's own headline for it is two words: no cap. | Google's page: "No cap" and "without subscription". The one limit is the language. English only, and Google says other languages are not supported yet. | Unlimited, cleanup included, on a model running on your Mac. The meter here is the language, not the minutes. |
| Superwhisper | Free tier with no cap on the part that transcribes, plus a taste of the paid part. | "Unlimited use of Whisper models" on the free plan, and 3,000 words of the Pro features to try before they stop. | Unlimited for local transcription. The Pro trial is about 24 minutes of talking, once. |
| MacWhisper | Free version, bought-once upgrade. No subscription exists. | "€0 / month, Free forever", and the free version already includes system-wide dictation and 100 languages. Pro is €64 for a licence with lifetime updates. | Unlimited. What €64 buys is more export formats and AI features, not more minutes. |
| Spokenly | Free if the model runs on your machine or on your own API key. | Free: "Unlimited use" of local Whisper and Parakeet models, and "$0 forever" again for cloud models run on your own API keys. Pro is 9.99 USD a month for their managed cloud models. | Unlimited locally. You pay for someone else's servers, not for the software. |
| Willow | Capped by quality rather than quantity, which is unusual and worth understanding. | Basic: "Unlimited weaker speech-to-text model (Frontier Mini)", plus "Limited personalization, 20 Scribe uses per week". Pro is 15 USD a month, 12 billed annually. | Unlimited, on the model they themselves call weaker. There is no word cap to convert. |
| Lispr | Free with no sign-up, capped by a weekly allowance of minutes. | The free plan has "60 dictation minutes per week, resets every Monday". Pro is 7.99 USD a month or 79 a year. | 60 minutes of talking a week, resetting every Monday. It is the only cap here already stated in minutes, so there is nothing to convert. |
| Wispr Flow | Classic resetting word cap, and the one most people are actually asking about. | Free: "2,000/week on desktop", "1,000/week on mobile". Pro is 15 USD per user a month, 12 billed annually. | About 16 minutes of talking a week on a Mac, so roughly two and a quarter minutes a day. On a phone it is half of that. |
| AI Dictation | A one-time trial, not a recurring tier. | "Free trial: 5,000 words, no credit card." Then 8.49 USD a month. | About 40 minutes of talking, once. Nothing renews, so this is a trial rather than a free tier. |
| Aqua Voice | A one-off allowance, not a recurring one. Read that carefully before you spend it. | Starter: "1,000 free words", with no reset period published. Pro is 10 USD a month or 8 billed annually, Max is 30 and 24. | About 8 minutes of talking. Not a week, not a month. As far as their pricing page says, once. |
| VoiceInk | No free tier by design. A trial, then you own it. | A trial is offered with no limits stated on the pricing page. Licences are one-time: 25 USD for one Mac, 39 for two, 49 for three, with a 14-day refund. | Unlimited after 25 USD. Against a 12 USD monthly subscription it pays for itself in about two months. |
| Sonira | Free during the open beta, which is not a free tier and we would rather you did not read it as one. | No cap today, because there is no paid plan for a free tier to sit under. We have not decided the pricing yet. | Unlimited for now. Plan around the tools above, not around this row. |
Every cap and price in this table was read on each maker's own pricing page on 5 September 2026. Where a page states no reset period, this table says so instead of assuming one. Superwhisper's exact subscription price is described rather than quoted because the figure did not render reliably enough to trust. Our 126 words a minute comes from Sonira's own dictation log, one heavy user, so treat it as a conversion rate and not as a claim about you. Prices move: the makers are the source, not this page. Google AI Edge Eloquent was added on 12 October 2026 from Google's own page, read that day.
Three different meanings of one word
"Free tier" is doing four jobs at once
The reason no comparison page will tell you which free tier is biggest is that they are not the same kind of thing. Sorted by what actually runs out.
Capped by words, which reset
Wispr Flow gives 2,000 words a week on desktop. This is the only shape that converts cleanly into minutes, and the conversion is unkind: a weekly 2,000 is about two minutes of talking a day. If dictation is the way you write, you will meet this cap in the first week. If it is something you reach for twice a day, you may never see it.
Capped by words, once
Aqua Voice gives 1,000 words and publishes no reset. AI Dictation gives 5,000 and calls it a trial, which is the honest word for both. That is about eight minutes and about forty, and each is better understood as a demo than as a plan. It is a perfectly fair way to run a trial. It is just not the same object as the row above it, and no table that prints both numbers side by side tells you that.
Capped by quality, or not capped at all
Willow gives you unlimited words on the model it calls weaker and sells you the better one. Superwhisper, MacWhisper and Spokenly give you unlimited words because the model runs on your Mac and costs them nothing, and Google's Eloquent does the same with the cleanup pass included. Apple gives you unlimited words because it is already in the operating system. When the transcription is local, there is no meter to run down.
So the real question is not which free tier is most generous. It is which kind of limit you are agreeing to. A cloud tool has to meter you, because every word you say costs the maker money. A local tool does not, because it costs them nothing. That single fact explains every row in the table above, and it is the thing to decide first.
Sonira
We are the least useful row on this page, and we will say why
Sonira is free right now, and that is not a free tier. It is an open beta with no paid plan behind it yet. Anyone telling you their beta is generous is telling you they have not finished pricing it, and we would rather be the ones who say that out loud.
What we will commit to is the thing this page is really about: when there is a price, the number will be on the page. Not "generous limits", not "unlimited for most users". A figure you can divide by 126 and know how long it lasts.
Sonira is cloud, so eventually it has to meter something. If a hard rule that nothing you say leaves your Mac matters more to you than anything else here, the honest answers are Apple Dictation, MacWhisper, VoiceInk or Spokenly on local models, and you should go and use one of them.
Read-aloud is in the build on this site, the current one.
One rate, 126 words a minute, measured over 186 real dictations
Five minutes, no downloads
How to tell whether a free tier fits you before you pay
You do not need any of the apps above to answer this, and you certainly do not need ours. You need your own words-per-minute and an honest count of the days you would use it.
- 01
Measure how fast you actually talk
Open any Mac app, turn on the built-in Dictation, and speak normally for one minute about something you know. Count the words. Most people land between 120 and 150. Ours came out at 126 across 186 real dictations, which is why that is the number on this page. Use yours, not ours.
- 02
Count the days you would really dictate
Not the days you would like to. The honest number is usually lower, and it is the one that decides this. Someone who dictates every email is a different customer from someone who dictates a few Slack replies on Tuesdays, and the same free tier is generous to one and useless to the other.
- 03
Divide the cap by your rate
2,000 words at 126 a minute is about 16 minutes of talking. Spread that across the days you counted. If it comes out under two minutes a day and you write for a living, you have your answer already and it did not cost you anything to get it.
- 04
Check whether it resets, and how often
This is the step people skip and it changes everything. A weekly 2,000 is 104,000 words a year. A monthly 2,000 is 24,000. A one-off 1,000 is 1,000. Three numbers that look almost identical on a pricing page and differ by a hundredfold in practice.
- 05
Rule out free forever before you rule it in
Try Apple Dictation for a week first. It is already installed, it has no cap, and if it is enough for you then every subscription on this page is money you did not need to spend. If it is not enough, you will know exactly which part failed, and that is a far better question to take shopping than "which is best".
No account, no download and no card needed for any of these five steps. If a comparison page will not let you reach a conclusion without installing something, that is the tell.
Asked and answered
The questions behind the search
- 01Is Wispr Flow free?
- There is a free plan, and on a Mac it is capped at 2,000 words a week. At an ordinary speaking rate that is about 16 minutes of talking, roughly two and a quarter minutes a day. Mobile is 1,000 a week, on iPhone and on Android alike. Beyond that it is 15 USD per user a month, or 12 billed annually. Checked on wisprflow.ai on 28 September 2026.
- 02What is the best free dictation app for Mac?
- The Dictation built into macOS, for most people. It costs nothing, needs no account, and Apple's own guide says you can dictate text of any length without a timeout. If you want something better than it and still free, the next answers are Superwhisper, MacWhisper or Spokenly running models locally on your Mac, or Google's Eloquent if you dictate in English only, because local transcription has no meter. Every cloud tool's free tier is a trial with a number on it.
- 03How many words is a minute of talking?
- About 120 to 150 for most people speaking naturally. We measured 126 across 186 real dictations in Sonira, 3,523 words over 28 minutes of speech. It is one heavy user rather than a study, so measure your own: one minute of normal speech into any dictation tool, then count. It takes a minute and it makes every free tier on this page comparable.
- 04Do free dictation tiers reset?
- It depends, and the difference is enormous. Wispr Flow's 2,000 words reset weekly. Aqua Voice publishes 1,000 free words and no reset period at all, and AI Dictation's 5,000 are a trial that never comes back. Always look for the period next to the number, because the number on its own tells you almost nothing.
- 05Is buying a licence cheaper than subscribing?
- Usually, if you keep using it. VoiceInk is 25 USD once for one Mac and MacWhisper Pro is 64 EUR once, against 12 to 15 USD a month for the subscription tools. VoiceInk pays for itself in about two months. The trade is real though: a one-time licence usually means the model runs on your Mac, which is private and free but not always as accurate as a hosted model, and nobody is paying to improve it every month.
- 06Is Sonira free?
- It is free during the open beta and there is no paid plan yet. That is not a free tier and you should not plan around it. When there is a price we will publish the actual number and the actual cap on this site rather than calling the limits generous. Until then, if what you need is a guaranteed free tool, the other rows in the table are the honest answer.
Try the free one first
Then come back if it was not enough
The full lineup: platforms, prices and offline support
Leaving Wispr Flow: six reasons and where each one leads