Mac guide · Updated
How to use voice to text on a Mac.
Your Mac already includes free voice to text. It’s called Dictation. Here’s how to turn it on, start and stop it, what it handles well, and when a dedicated app such as Yap is the better fit.
Free and built in
Turn on Dictation.
Apple says you can dictate text anywhere you can type it: mail, notes, messages, documents and web forms.
Open Keyboard settings.
Choose Apple menu → System Settings, then click Keyboard in the sidebar. You may need to scroll down.
Turn on Dictation.
Go to Dictation and turn it on. If you’re asked, click Enable.
Pick your shortcut and languages.
Choose the keyboard shortcut you want, and click Edit next to Languages to add any language you dictate in. How to add and switch dictation languages.
Dictate.
Click where the text should go. Press the Microphone key in the top row if your keyboard has one, use your Dictation shortcut, or choose Edit → Start Dictation. Stop with Escape, the Microphone key or the shortcut. Dictation also stops by itself after 30 seconds without speech.
What it does well
- It costs nothing and needs no install.
- On a Mac with an M3 chip or later and at least 12 GB of memory, macOS 27 makes it more accurate in English. Which Macs get it.
- Apple says you can dictate text of any length without a timeout.
- In supported languages it adds commas, periods and question marks for you. Say an emoji’s name, like “heart emoji”, to insert it.
- Keyboard settings show whether your dictation is processed on your Mac rather than sent to Apple’s Siri servers.
- To switch language mid-task, click the language shown next to the cursor or press the Globe key.
Source: Apple’s guide, Dictate messages and documents on Mac. Menu names can differ slightly on older versions of macOS. Not working? See fixes by symptom.
No install, no account
Try local voice to text right here.
This demo downloads a small English speech model into your browser, then turns a sentence of your speech into text inside this tab. Your audio is not uploaded.
It shows how on-device recognition feels. It is a separate, smaller model, so it does not represent the Mac app’s speed or accuracy. Speech models like this one learn partly from recordings that people transcribe and check by hand, which is paid remote work: open roles and what they pay are listed under transcription jobs on AITraining.jobs, a database we also maintain.
Need more than a sentence? The free online dictation tool takes recordings of up to 2 minutes, adds each one to text you can edit, and saves it as a file. It also works in other languages.
Your voice. No app needed.
We’ll guide you through a first-use model download before you speak.
First, a guided download. Then, your voice.
English demo, up to 60 seconds. Audio and text stay in this tab. The model is cached in this browser for next time, while storage is available.
Beyond the built-in option
When a dedicated app is worth it.
If built-in Dictation does what you need, keep using it. A separate app earns its place when one of these matters to you.
You speak more than one language.
Dictation listens for the language you selected, and you switch it yourself. Yap detects the language of each recording from your voice, so you can dictate one message in English and the next in Dutch without changing a setting.
On macOS 14 or later, its upgraded engine covers 25 languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Finnish, Swedish, Danish, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, and Maltese. Other languages and older macOS versions use compatible local recognition. Accuracy varies by language, voice and microphone.
You want to hold a key and talk.
Hold Fn, speak, and release. The text lands at your cursor. For longer thoughts, press Space while holding Fn to keep recording hands-free, then tap Fn to finish. Escape cancels. You can change both keys in Settings.
You want to find what you said.
Completed transcripts are kept in a local History on your Mac, where you can copy or delete them. Inserting text does not change your clipboard.
You want your voice kept on your Mac.
Speech recognition runs on your Mac. Audio is not uploaded to a transcription service. The first launch, starting a trial and periodic access checks do need internet. How offline dictation works.
Built-in Dictation and Yap, side by side.
| Feature | Dictation (built in) | Yap |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free, part of macOS. | $6.90 USD a month or $69 USD a year, after 3 free days and a 10-day trial with a card. |
| Macs | Built into macOS. | Apple Silicon Macs (M1 or later). |
| Start and stop | Microphone key, your Dictation shortcut, or Edit → Start Dictation. Stops with Escape, the same key, or after 30 seconds without speech. | Hold Fn and release to insert. Space while holding Fn keeps it recording hands-free. Escape cancels. |
| Length | Any length without a timeout, according to Apple. | Up to 5 minutes per recording. At the limit it stops and transcribes what you said. |
| Languages | The language you select. You switch it yourself. | Detected from your voice for each recording. |
| Where speech is processed | Keyboard settings show whether it is processed on your Mac or sent to Apple’s Siri servers. | On your Mac. Audio is not uploaded. |
| Tidying | Automatic commas, periods and question marks in supported languages. Emoji by name. | Removes “um” and “uh” in English, capitalizes sentences and adds a closing period. Spoken commands like “new paragraph” are an optional setting. |
Built-in details from Apple’s Mac User Guide, checked Oct 8, 2026. Yap details reflect the current Mac app.
Looking for something else?
- I want my Mac to read text aloud.
- That’s the reverse, text to speech. Turn on Speak selection in System Settings → Accessibility → Read & Speak, then select text and press Option-Esc to hear it. Apple’s guide.
- I want to control my whole Mac by voice.
- Use Voice Control in System Settings → Accessibility → Voice Control. It lets you speak commands to navigate apps, interact with what’s on screen, and dictate and edit text. Apple’s guide.
- I used Dragon on my Mac.
- Nuance discontinued Dragon for Mac in 2018. What happened to Dragon for Mac, and what to use now.
- I’m choosing between Yap, Wispr Flow and Aqua Voice.
- Wispr Flow and Aqua Voice transcribe in the cloud and run on more devices; Yap recognizes speech on your Mac. See the side-by-side comparisons with Wispr Flow and Aqua Voice.
- I dictate prompts into Claude Code.
- Claude Code has its own dictation, /voice, which sends audio to Anthropic and needs a Claude.ai sign-in. How to use it, and how to dictate when it isn’t available.
- I use an Intel Mac or Windows.
- Yap runs on Apple Silicon Macs and on Windows 10 and 11: get it for Windows. There is no Intel Mac version. Built-in Dictation, described above, is part of macOS on Intel Macs too.
From the library
Mac Dictation: How to Dictate and Control a Mac by Voice
Every Mac has free, built-in Dictation: turn it on once in System Settings > Keyboard, press the Microphone key or your shortcut in any text field and speak, and on Apple silicon Macs 48 of its 63 language variants can be processed on the Mac itself. Voice Control adds hands-free commands for the whole computer. When dictation fails, the cause is one of five things: the shortcut, the microphone, the language, Voice Control or the app you are typing in; when you need long, specialist or AI-formatted text, a dedicated Mac dictation app is the next step.