You speak faster than you type. The question is whether your tools can keep up.
This is a practical way to think about speed, accuracy, and privacy on macOS.
TL;DR
- Short phrases (5–15s): handshakes and round‑trips dominate cloud flows. On‑device avoids them.
- Long sessions (minutes): uploads and proxy hops add up. On‑device streams live and only finalizes the last ~30s when you stop.
- Accuracy: cleaner input beats heavy “prompt fixes.”
- Privacy: App Store sandboxed; your audio stays on your Mac.
Explore it yourself with the interactive:
- → Try the demo: /blog/latency-demo
If you just want setup steps first: /voice-typing-mac and /answers/turn-on-voice-typing-mac.
What makes cloud feel slow (sometimes)
Cloud tools can be excellent. But for dictation, they pay a network tax: TLS/DNS handshakes, upload time (bigger if you avoid lossy compression), and often a proxy hop for a rewrite step. On hotel or café Wi‑Fi, this becomes noticeable, especially for very short or very long recordings.
Why on‑device feels steady
Voice Type streams locally and transcribes in ~30‑second windows. When you stop, we finish only the last window - typically ≈2–3 seconds on an M1 Mac. There’s no large file upload. If you enable bring‑your‑own‑key rewrites, we talk directly to your provider in a single hop.
Accuracy you can feel (without heavy prompting)
We normalize loudness, gently remove rumble, and detect speech vs background so the recognizer hears what you meant - not the room. This keeps transcripts faithful without forcing words via prompts.
Privacy and reviews you can verify
Distributed through the Mac App Store; Apple sandboxing applies. Reviews are genuine App Store reviews - critical ones included.
Where cloud still shines
Team workflows that need server‑side storage, specialized hosted models, or shared corpora can be a better fit in the cloud.
Keep exploring
- Short utterances: when handshakes dominate → /blog/short-utterances-handshakes
- Long sessions: uploads vs windowing → /blog/long-sessions-windowing
- Accuracy basics in plain English → /blog/audio-conditioning-accuracy
- Trust signals → /blog/reviews-and-privacy
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