Private, offline dictation for Mac

Aloud turns speech into text on your Mac. Your voice is never uploaded. There's no account to make and nothing to subscribe to.

Where your voice goes

Nowhere. Speech recognition runs on your Mac's Apple silicon. Aloud hears you, types the text where your cursor is, and that's the end of it. There's no server in the middle, so there's nothing to leak, log or train on.

What Aloud connects to

Only two things, and neither carries your words:

• The voice download. Once, during setup. It's about 500 MB.
• Update checks. Once a day, Aloud asks getaloud.work if there's a new version.

Nothing is sent: no recordings, no transcripts, no identifiers, no usage data.

Works offline

After setup, turn off Wi-Fi and keep talking. On a plane, on a train, in a café with bad internet. Dictation works the same, because it never needed the network.

What stays on your Mac

Everything. Your History of exactly what you said, your Vocabulary of names and terms, your Snippets, and your settings. Aloud tidies as it types, dropping the “um”s, but the exact words stay in History so nothing is silently rewritten.

Two permissions, and why

• Microphone, to hear you while you hold the key.
• Accessibility, to type the text into the app you're using.

Aloud listens when you ask it to: while you hold your dictation key, in hands-free mode, or when you answer a coding agent with Agent Speak. A small indicator shows when it's listening.

Free, with nothing to sign up for

No account, no subscription, no ads. Aloud runs on any Mac with Apple silicon and macOS 14 or later. See how the Mac dictation app works, or how it compares in Aloud vs Superwhisper.