Dictation is the one voice feature on a Mac that people go looking for by name. This page covers what macOS already does for free, what the paid apps add and what they charge, and the one capability that separates the newest tools from all of them: dictation that can read the screen you are dictating into.
Start with the one you already have
macOS has system-wide dictation built in. Turn it on in System Settings › Keyboard › Dictation, then press fn twice with your cursor in any text field. On Apple Silicon many languages run entirely on-device, so it works with no network and nothing leaves the machine.
It is free, it is already installed, and a surprising number of people paying for dictation have never switched it on. Try it for a week before buying anything.
Where it stops. Three places, and they are the reason a paid market exists at all:
- You speak the punctuation. “Comma”, “full stop”, “new paragraph”. Fine for a sentence, wearing for an email.
- It transcribes, it does not tidy. Every false start, every “um”, every repeated word lands in the text exactly as you said it.
- It has no idea what you are looking at. This is the big one, and the rest of this page is about it.
What the paid dictation apps add
The current generation runs a better speech model, then passes the raw transcript through a language model that removes the disfluencies and adds the punctuation. You talk the way you talk and clean prose appears. That is genuinely worth money if you write by voice all day.
Prices checked 3 September 2026, from each vendor's own site. This is a fast-moving market and these will drift — check before you buy.
| Tool | Free tier | Paid | Can it click? |
|---|---|---|---|
| macOS Dictation | Unlimited, on-device | — | No |
| Superwhisper | Yes | Pro $8 / month | No |
| Wispr Flow | 2,000 words / week | Pro $15 / month, or $12 billed annually | No |
| Reflick | Unlimited on every plan | Dictation is never metered | Yes, separately |
The column that matters most for a heavy user is the free one. A 2,000-word weekly cap is roughly four emails a day; unlimited on-device dictation has no cap at all, which is a real argument for starting with what Apple gives you.
The thing none of the above can do
Every tool listed so far, including the expensive ones, is deaf to context. It hears your voice and types your words. It cannot see the email you are replying to.
So this works:
You say “Thanks Sam, Tuesday at four works for me, I'll send an invite.” → it types that sentence.
And this does not:
You say “Reply that Tuesday works.” → it types the words “reply that Tuesday works”.
The second is what people actually want when their hands are busy, and it needs something the dictation tools do not have: access to the window you are typing into.
Screen-aware dictation, and why it is a genuinely hard call
Once dictation can rewrite what you said, it has to decide when to. Get that wrong in the generous direction and you have made a tool nobody can trust: you say a sentence, something else appears, and now you have to proofread every line you dictate. That is worse than a dumb transcriber.
The correct default is literal. Rewriting should happen only when you clearly asked for it — and openers matter here more than they look. “Say” and “tell” are exactly the words people use when quoting themselves, so treating them as commands would misfire constantly.
How to choose
| If you | Use |
|---|---|
| Just want your words typed | Built-in Dictation. Free, on-device, no cap. |
| Dictate long prose daily | A paid dictation app, for the automatic punctuation and cleanup. |
| Want “reply that Tuesday works” to work | Something that can read your screen. |
| Also want the Mac operated, not just typed into | A voice agent — see controlling your Mac by voice. |
Where Reflick fits
Reflick is the product this site sells, so read this as the interested party talking.
Hold ⌥⇧ and it types what you say into whatever field has focus. Because it is also reading the screen, “reply that Tuesday works” reads the message in front of you and writes the reply. Literal is the default, deliberately, for the reason above.
Dictation is free and unlimited on every plan, including the free one, and so is asking about your screen. Reflick meters only agent runs — tasks it performs for you end to end — at one run per task however many steps it takes. That is a different shape of pricing from a word cap, and it is the honest reason dictation costs nothing here: dictating is cheap to run, so charging for it would be charging for the habit rather than the work.
Reflick 1.0 is out and you can download it for Mac now. Dictation is free and unlimited on every plan including the free one, so nothing here is behind a word cap. There is a fuller list of questions, a companion guide to controlling your Mac by voice, and every Mac voice tool compared.