You found Talon Voice and cannot tell whether it is what you wanted. One question settles it. Do you want to drive the whole computer by voice, or just get your words typed into the app in front of you?
What Talon Voice actually is
Talon’s tagline is “Powerful hands-free input”, and its features are Voice Control, Noise Control (“click with a back-beat”), Eye Tracking and Python Scripts. Its docs are explicit: Talon “aims to bring programming, realtime video gaming, command line, and full desktop computer proficiency to people who have limited or no use of their hands”. The community wiki calls it “a hands-free input replacement for the keyboard and mouse” and says “Talon is free to use and ongoing development is made possible by donations on Patreon”. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux / X11, comes with a free speech recognition engine, and is compatible with Dragon with no additional setup. Eye tracking depends on a single Tobii 4C, Tobii 5 or equivalent tracker, so that part needs hardware. If your hands are the constraint, Talon is the serious answer, and our hands-free guide for RSI and carpal tunnel sits alongside it.
The real cost is learning it
Talon’s docs are candid: “Your user scripts control all of the voice commands in Talon, so Talon won’t recognize any commands until you add some scripts.” So you clone the community command set, whose README tells you to “learn the alphabet first, then get familiar with the keys, symbols, formatters, mouse, and edit commands”. Formatting is spoken too, and Talon’s site and docs make no claim about automatic punctuation or capitalisation. You pay for that power in hours up front.
What Dictato does instead
Dictato has nothing to script. It pastes text into whatever app has focus, so it needs no per-app integration. Numbers, dates, times, currency, percentages, ordinals and phone numbers get rewritten by a fixed rule set that always gives the same output, with nothing to switch on, though that layer covers English and French only. Capitals after an existing full stop, filler-word removal and duplicate word removal are automatic too. Punctuation, commas and paragraph breaks are a different story. They come from on-device AI, they stay off until you turn on Auto-correct or set up a per-app profile, and being model output they are not deterministic. Paragraph breaks follow topic changes, not your pauses. Recognition and clean-up both run on your Mac, and the only network traffic is licence, trial and update checks. No third-party analytics and no third-party crash reporting, though anonymous trial usage counters do exist, with a toggle. Pay once, 19.99 EUR, for life. See the developers dictation guide or the Dragon comparison.
What Dictato plainly cannot do
Control your Mac. No clicking, no cursor, no scrolling, no switching apps, no editing text that is already on screen. Its spoken commands are off by default and only substitute text (emoji, some punctuation signs, breaks, your own phrases), and there is no spoken period, question mark or exclamation mark.
Which one you want
Need to run the machine by voice? That is Talon. Already use a keyboard and just want clean text where you are typing? That is Dictato, whose 7-day trial needs no email.