Dictato is built for people who want to dictate into their Mac without sending audio to a server. Everything — listening, punctuation, paragraph breaks, number and date formatting, and the optional tone rewrites — happens locally on the machine, so it keeps working offline and on a plane. The app is a live dictation tool: you press a hotkey (hold it or tap to toggle), speak, and finished text appears where your cursor is. It is not a batch transcriber, so for hours of pre-recorded interviews a dedicated file-based tool fits better.
The app exposes four speech engines and lets you switch in one click. One is tuned for speed on Apple Silicon, one covers 99 languages, one is a lighter multilingual option, and the fourth lets macOS supply the model itself. Dictato starts you on whichever engine fits your macOS version, so you never have to choose on day one. A separate proofreading layer cleans the raw transcript before it reaches the cursor.
Setup asks for two macOS permissions — microphone and accessibility — and a third (automation) only if you use per-website rules or want the app to pause your music. Profiles let you assign a different tone, engine and language per application or per website: an email tone in Gmail, plain proofreading in an editor, verbatim in the terminal. Dictation history, including the audio and the original raw transcript, is stored locally and never synced, and you can delete the lot in one click. The licence covers one Mac at a time, which you can move up to three times per 30 days, and updates are lifetime. A 14-day refund is offered, and pricing is listed as 19.99 € once with VAT included.
