Cloud dictation got fast and clever, and Aqua Voice is one of the better ones. Dictato answers the same problem by keeping the whole job on your Mac. Here is what separates them, with prices as listed in August 2026.
Aqua’s real advantages
Aqua Voice’s Edit Mode lets you revise text you already wrote by speaking. Edits stack and can be undone, and it is open to every desktop user, not just a top tier. Deep Context reads on-screen content to help with names, code and jargon, and the vendor says it runs client-side, off by default. One account covers Mac, Windows and iPhone, and it handles roughly fifty languages with automatic detection. Dictato has no equivalent: it writes new text at your cursor, never rewrites what is on the page.
Cloud by design, and what that buys
Aqua’s own Mac page says audio is processed in the cloud, and that “there is no offline mode”. An account is mandatory. Privacy Mode exists but ships off, and the privacy policy (updated 29 July 2026) says that with it disabled the company may store transcript data on its servers to improve the product, and that otherwise it is not collected. Team plans can enforce it org-wide, and it is SOC 2 Type II certified with a public trust page.
Dictato made the opposite trade: transcription and clean-up run on your Mac, so your recording and your words never leave the machine. Some traffic remains: a licence or trial check carrying a hashed hardware ID and version numbers, an update check, one-time model downloads, and aggregate usage counters during the trial if you opt in. No transcript, no audio and no typed content is transmitted. More on that in offline speech to text on Mac.
The bill, year after year
Starter gives 1,000 free words per account, once, no card. Pro is $8/month billed annually ($96/year) or $10 monthly, Max $24/month annually ($288/year) or $30. Team and Enterprise sit above. There is no lifetime or one-time option. Dictato is 19.99 EUR once, with a 7-day trial and no account, login or email. The long-run maths is in the real cost of speech to text.
Numbers that never drift
Numbers, dates, currency, percentages, ordinals and phone numbers are rewritten by a rules layer rather than a model, so that step cannot invent a digit, and it runs last, after any AI pass. No toggle. The grammar covers English and French only (French applies when you pick it as your dictation language). Filler sounds and immediately repeated words are dropped the same way. Not so for sentence shape. Commas, full stops, capitals and paragraph breaks come from a local AI step that stays dormant until you enable Auto-correct or build a per-app profile. The breaks follow topic changes, not pauses. Details in dictating numbers, dates and currency.
Pick by constraint, not by feature list
Dictato needs an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 14 or later, no Windows and no Intel, and the first run pulls a multi-gigabyte engine.
If you want voice editing and screen awareness across three operating systems, and your work tolerates recordings leaving the machine, Aqua Voice is a fair-priced answer. If you dictate without a connection, or your material cannot be sent to a server at all, Aqua rules itself out, in its own words. Formatting that comes out the same every time, with nothing to configure, is Dictato’s side of the trade.