If you dictate a few notes a week, you probably do not need to install anything. Speechnotes has been the default answer for years, and it earns it.
What Speechnotes genuinely gets right
Open a tab, click the mic, talk. No download, no account, no setup. The core notepad is free and works on any operating system with Chrome or Edge, which no Mac-only tool can match. There is a Chrome extension that puts a floating mic button on web pages, and an Android app their site reports at over 5 million downloads. Simplicity is why that user base got so big.
Their premium tier is priced kindly too. As listed on their pricing and upgrade pages in July 2026, it is $1.9 per month billed for a year, and it explicitly does not auto-renew, so it cannot quietly bill you forever. There is also a separate pay-as-you-go transcription product at $0.1 per minute, no subscription. That is an honest way to sell software.
For the dictation notepad, Speechnotes states it never has access to your recorded audio. Recognition is handed off to the browser’s or the operating system’s speech service, so Speechnotes itself never receives the recording.
The distinction worth understanding
“Speechnotes does not get your audio” and “your audio stays on your machine” are two different statements, and only the first one is being made. In the browser, your voice still travels to a third-party speech service run by Google or Microsoft. Speechnotes is being accurate about their own role, not about the journey. It also means the browser version needs a live internet connection: no signal, no dictation.
If that trade is fine with you, and for a shopping list it usually is, stop reading. Keep the tab.
Where it stops being enough
There is no Speechnotes for Mac. The tab is the app, and it has a hard edge. The extension covers text boxes on the web. What it cannot reach is everything that is not a web page: Mail, Pages, a code editor. Text lands in the notepad, and getting it out means selecting, copying, and pasting. Do that thirty times a day and it stops being free.
That specific gap is what dictating into any Mac app solves. Dictato puts your cursor where you already are, you talk, and the words appear in the app you are actually using. You never copy or paste anything.
The privacy story works differently. Dictation runs on your Mac. After a one-time setup download of the speech model, it never needs the internet again. Your recording and your words never leave the machine. If you want the full picture of what “local” actually means, we wrote a speech-to-text privacy guide.
There is also the part nobody enjoys fixing by hand: numbers, dates, and currency. In English and French, Dictato formats these by fixed rules with no setup, so the same sentence always comes out the same way. Punctuation, casing, and paragraphs are available too, off by default until you turn on Auto-correct or a per-app profile.
The honest summary
Speechnotes is free and starts instantly on any machine with a browser. Dictato costs 19.99 EUR once, lifetime, no account, with a 7-day trial and no card. It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon, so Intel Macs are out.
Pick by where your text has to end up.