Serious dictation, on-device

Real dictation on Mac, since Dragon left.

Nuance discontinued Dragon for Mac in 2018. The people who relied on it — writers, lawyers, clinicians, and anyone whose work runs on the spoken word — have been improvising ever since. TongueType is a Whisper-powered Mac dictation app, 100% on-device, that picks up where it left off.

Download Free What you get

macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · Free forever, Pro if you want

Who this is for

Writers and authors

Long-form drafting at speaking pace. Talk a chapter out, clean it up afterward. Holds up for hours because nothing is being streamed to a server.

Lawyers and paralegals

Briefs, memos, and case notes that can’t leave the building, let alone the machine. Audio is processed entirely on-device — no third-party transcription, no cloud account.

Medical professionals

Clinical notes, patient communications, and reports dictated on a Mac that never sends the audio anywhere. TongueType makes no compliance claims, but the technical fact is that recordings stay on your Mac.

Accessibility users

Anyone for whom typing is painful, slow, or impossible. The hotkey is a single key, designed to be reached one-handed. See the Accessibility page for the full rundown.

Researchers and academics

Interview transcripts, lecture notes, fieldwork voice memos. Drop files in and get text out, locally. No NDA conversation needed with a transcription vendor.

Former Dragon users

If you’ve been waiting for a Mac app that handles real long-form dictation again, this is it. Not a 1-for-1 replacement of the old workflow, but the closest thing on macOS today.

What you get with TongueType

Whisper-grade accuracy

TongueType runs OpenAI’s Whisper model locally via CoreML on the Apple Neural Engine. Whisper handles accents, background noise, and the occasional mumble well, and it has a strong vocabulary across professional domains out of the box. It’s accurate enough that fixing transcripts is much faster than typing them out from scratch.

Custom vocabulary that sticks

Whisper is general-purpose, but technical jargon, drug names, surnames, and Latin terms still benefit from a personal touch. TongueType’s postprocessing rules map whatever Whisper writes to whatever you actually want — case names spelled the firm’s way, abbreviations expanded, and so on. Rules are stored on your Mac and sync across your devices via iCloud if you opt in.

Works inside any app

Press the hotkey, speak, release. Your transcript appears at the cursor inside Word, Pages, Notes, your EHR, your case-management tool, your email client, your code editor. If you skip the optional Accessibility permission, the transcript lands on the clipboard instead and you paste it. Either path keeps the audio entirely on your Mac.

A file-transcription path too

Drop an audio or video file into Transcribe audio/video file… from the menu bar. Useful for depositions, interviews, lectures, meeting recordings, and the voice memos you record on a phone in the field. Pro removes the per-file cap so a full deposition or grand-rounds recording can be transcribed in one pass.

No subscription

The free tier covers 30 minutes of live dictation per month with every feature included. Pro is a one-time $19.99 purchase, good on up to 5 Macs. Once you’ve bought it, it’s yours — even if we go quiet, your existing install keeps working.

Where TongueType differs

A short, honest list. TongueType isn’t trying to be a 2018 Dragon clone.

Whisper isn’t trained on your voice

Older dictation software built a per-user voice profile over time. Whisper doesn’t do that — it’s a general model that’s already very good. The trade-off: there’s no enrollment, no profile to corrupt, no “please re-read this paragraph” ritual. Your “customization” lives in postprocessing rules instead.

No macros or command mode

TongueType doesn’t do “select last paragraph, bold that, move to next page.” It transcribes what you say. If you need voice-driven app control, this isn’t the tool for it. If you need to write a lot of words quickly, it is.

Native Apple Silicon, never Intel

TongueType requires an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). The Whisper model runs on the Neural Engine; performance and battery use are both better there than they ever could have been on Intel.

For privacy-sensitive work

The single load-bearing claim of this app: audio never leaves your Mac. Transcription happens locally on the Apple Neural Engine. We don’t run servers that touch your audio, we don’t use a third-party speech API, and the app doesn’t need an internet connection to function.

If your work involves client confidentiality, patient information, or other sensitive material, that on-device guarantee is the point. We don’t make HIPAA, SOC 2, or other compliance certifications — certifications attach to organizations and processes, not to a desktop app. What we can describe is the behavior: TongueType has no network call path for transcription audio. You can verify that with a tool like Little Snitch or by pulling the Wi-Fi out and watching it keep working.