We use Voice Type ourselves. Every day. Here's what we've learned matters.
Accuracy is preprocessing
Most dictation apps treat audio as a black box: record, send, hope. We found that cleaning the signal before recognition makes the biggest difference. Normalize loudness. Cut the low rumble. Detect speech vs silence properly.
The recognizer does better work when it gets cleaner input. Fancy prompt engineering can't fix muddy audio.
Offline isn't a limitation
Processing on-device used to mean worse quality. Not anymore. Whisper-style models running on Apple Silicon match or beat most cloud services for English dictation. And you skip the network tax entirely.
No upload. No waiting for servers. No privacy questions.
Technical terms need help
Generic models stumble on product names, jargon, and anything that isn't in a dictionary. We let you add custom vocabulary. Names that repeat become anchors for the model. Your words, spelled your way.
Hold-to-talk beats toggle
We tried both. Toggle mode ("press once to start, again to stop") leads to accidental transcription of side conversations. Hold-to-talk gives you precise control. Release and you're done.
One-time purchase, no upsells
Subscriptions make sense for some tools. For dictation software that runs locally and doesn't cost us per-request, they don't. Pay once, keep it.
Where we're still improving
Punctuation in noisy rooms. Very long sessions (30+ minutes). Languages beyond English. We ship updates regularly and read every review.
If you've tried cloud dictation and found it slow or inconsistent, give offline a shot. The 7-day trial is the real product, no feature gates.