FeatherweightThe short answer: open System Settings, choose Keyboard, and turn on Dictation. Then click where you want to type, press the Microphone key (or your Dictation shortcut) and talk. Press Escape when you're done.
Turn on Dictation
- Choose the Apple menu, then System Settings, and click Keyboard in the sidebar.
- Go to Dictation and turn it on. If your Mac asks, choose Enable.
- Apple asks whether to share your audio recordings to improve Siri and Dictation. Choose Not Now to keep them to yourself. You can change it later in Privacy & Security, under Analytics & Improvements.
- In the same place, check the language Dictation listens for, and the shortcut that starts it.
Start and stop dictating
- Click where you want the words to go: an email, a note, a chat, a search box.
- Press the Microphone key in the top row of your keyboard if it has one, or your Dictation shortcut, or choose Edit, then Start Dictation.
- Talk. The words appear as you speak.
- Press Esc when you're done. Dictation also stops by itself when it hears nothing for 30 seconds.
Press and release the Microphone key to dictate; press and hold it, and you're talking to Siri instead.
Change the Dictation shortcut
In System Settings, open Keyboard, then Dictation, and pick a shortcut from the Shortcut menu, or choose Customize and press your own (Apple's example is Option-Z). You can also set Press 🌐 key to so that pressing fn (🌐) twice starts Dictation.
Punctuation, new lines and emoji by voice
In supported languages, Dictation adds commas, periods and question marks for you. Turn that off with Auto-punctuation in the Dictation settings if you'd rather say every mark. You can also say:
- “comma”, “period”, “question mark” and the other marks by name
- “new line” and “new paragraph”
- “caps on” and “caps off”, “all caps”, “no space on” and “no space off”
- An emoji by name, like “heart emoji”, in supported languages
Words Dictation isn't sure of are underlined in blue: click one to pick another. On a Mac with Apple silicon you can keep typing while Dictation listens. To edit by voice (“replace cat with dog”), Apple has Voice Control, a separate Accessibility feature; while it's on, Dictation isn't available.
Does it work offline?
On a Mac with Apple silicon, Dictation runs on the Mac itself for 22 languages (48 regional versions), once their speech models have downloaded, so it works without the internet. Other languages, and Intel Macs, send your voice to Apple's servers. The note under Dictation in Keyboard settings tells you which applies to you. Apple says that what you dictate on its servers isn't stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri & Dictation.
What's new in macOS 27
macOS 27 adds a more advanced dictation that turns what you say into polished text, handling capitalization, punctuation and formatting, on the device. It works in English (nine regional versions, English (India) among them) on Macs with an M3 chip or later and at least 12 GB of memory.
When a dictation app does more
Built-in Dictation types what you say. A dictation app like Featherweight Dictation works the other way round: hold fn, talk, let go, and about a second later the text is typed, finished:
- Ums and uhs are gone, and when you correct yourself (“at five, actually six”) only 6 is typed.
- It's laid out for the app: an email in Mail with its greeting and sign-off on their own lines, one line in Slack, a numbered list when you count items out, a clean prompt in ChatGPT or Cursor.
- Spoken numbers, times and symbols come out as characters: “half past nine” types 9:30.
- It works the same on every Mac with macOS 14 or later, Intel included, in most major languages.
It needs the internet and costs $19 a month after a free trial, where Apple's is free. See Apple Dictation vs Featherweight Dictation, or every Mac dictation app side by side.