What we learned building a dictation app for Mac - Voice Type blog Skip to main content Voice Type Pricing Learn Enterprise Trust Blog Blog What we learned building a dictation app for Mac Notes on accuracy, privacy, and what actually matters when you dictate every day. ← Back to Blog | Home 28 Nov 2025 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. Next Core ML and Metal: why Apple Silicon changed on-device dictation Related articles Engineering Core ML and Metal: why Apple Silicon changed on-device dictation Running Whisper-style models locally without melting your laptop. Guide Voice typing on Mac: what actually works Quick notes on macOS dictation options and when each makes sense. Voice Type Learn All guides Voice Type vs Apple Dictation Dragon alternatives For writers For developers Notion on Mac Latency demo Press kit Company Enterprise Trust Center Pricing Blog Company Terms of service Privacy policy Contact us © 2025 Careless Whisper Inc.