Native Mac dictation, made by one indie dev
Press a hotkey, talk, and your words land wherever your cursor is. Fast on day one. Still fast on day one hundred.
Are we still on for dinner Sunday?
Tom says he's cooking 🍝
~/projects/site $ claude
✓ Updated css/site.css
What next?
Tap the keys (or press ⌥ \) to dictate. Tap again to finish.
Animated demo, not a screen recording. ⌥ \ is the default hotkey, and you can set your own.
How it works
Option + backslash out of the box. Change it to whatever your fingers like, or set up a couple of them.
No commands to learn, no special phrasing. Ramble, think out loud. Changed your mind? Esc cancels.
Clean, punctuated text drops in at your cursor. If it can't, it's on your clipboard and in History, and ⌃⌘V pastes your last one anywhere.
Speed
What drove me off the other apps wasn't day one. It was a few weeks in, when every dictation started crawling. When you talk all day, that's a dealbreaker. So that's the one thing I made sure Vocado gets right.
Speak for 30 seconds, get clean text back in under 2. Bars to scale.
Tiny and native
Vocado is a native Swift app. It lives in your menu bar, launches at login if you want, and doesn't chew through your RAM or battery while it waits for you to talk.
Features
Everyone in this space is piling on features. I wanted the opposite: quick, reliable, and dead simple. Adding a word to your dictionary or grabbing your last transcript should be one obvious step, not a dig through five menus.
History
Every dictation is saved on your Mac with the app it went into and when. Search it, copy it, or paste your last one anywhere.
Dictionary
Names people spell ten different ways, your clients, the town you live in. Add them once and they come out right. Or set a replacement, so saying "my email" types your address. It all syncs through iCloud.
Tell Eefa and Shivon at Calloway and co I'm in Lufborough on Friday. Reply to my email.
Appearance
Three big indicators, six small ones, or none at all. It shows up while you talk and gets out of the way when you're done.
Home
Your word count, speaking speed and time saved, your last five dictations, and one click to Record or Paste Last.
Your audio goes to the transcription service, comes back as text, and gets deleted. History stays on your Mac. No account, no screenshots, no clipboard logging.
Why I built it
I dictate for hours a day. Emails, messages, docs, notes, all my business stuff, plus prompts for the coding tools I build with. Last year I bounced between pretty much every Mac dictation app out there. Some were genuinely good. But every one had something that didn't work for me, and the big one was speed. Transcriptions got slow enough to be unusable when you're talking all day.
So I built the one I wanted. Quick, native, dead simple, with everything where you'd expect it. It's been my daily driver for months now, and it's earned its spot.
It's just me. No VC, no growth team. If you email support, you get the person who built it.
support@vocado.talkHow it stacks up
This space is crowded, and a lot of these apps are good. Here's how they differ, so you can pick the right one even if it isn't mine.
 Vocado |
Wispr Flow | Superwhisper | MacWhisper | VoiceInk | Spokenly | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for | Fast everyday dictation with nothing to set up | Cloud dictation with AI formatting and per-app styles, on Mac, Windows and phones | Power users who want local models, AI modes and lots of options | Transcribing audio and video files, with dictation on the side | Open-source, local-first dictation | Local models, your own API keys, AI modes and coding-agent hooks |
| Where it transcribes | Cloud (Groq) | Cloud | On your Mac, cloud optional | On your Mac, cloud optional, cloud optional (your own key) | On your Mac | On your Mac or cloud |
| Works offline | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Setup | Install and talk | Install, make an account | Pick and download models | Pick and download models | Pick and download models | Install and talk on a cloud trial, or pick a local model |
| Price | $4.99/mo or $39.99/yr | Free tier (2,000 words a week on desktop), Pro $15/mo or $144/yr | Free local tier, Pro $8.49/mo or $249.99 lifetime | Free version, Pro €64 one-time | One-time $25 to $49, free if you build it yourself | Free local tier, Local+ $29 once, Pro $15/mo or $144/yr |
Need offline? Go with one of the on-device apps, genuinely. Vocado is cloud only. That's the trade-off for the speed and the tiny app.
Longer, fair write-ups: vs Wispr Flow vs Superwhisper vs MacWhisper vs VoiceInk vs Spokenly vs Aqua Voice vs Apple Dictation
Other apps' details come from their own websites, checked November 2026. Prices and features change, so double-check before you decide.
Pricing
One plan, everything included. About a third of what the big VC-funded apps charge.
Download, open, talk. Everything's unlocked and there's no card to enter.
Start free trialThen pick a plan. Or skip the trial and subscribe now.
$4.99/month
Billed monthly, cancel anytime
$39.99/year
Works out to $3.33 a month
Payments handled by Paddle. 14-day money-back guarantee on your first payment. Prices in USD.
FAQ
Something not here? Email support@vocado.talk and I'll answer it myself.
Yes. 14 days, everything unlocked, no card. Download it, open it, dictate. If you want to keep it, subscribe from inside the app or from this page.
Anything you can type in. Mail, Gmail, Messages, WhatsApp, Slack, Notes, Word, Google Docs, Notion, your browser, even coding tools like Cursor. The text goes wherever your cursor is. If you've clicked somewhere that can't take text, it's on your clipboard and in History, and ⌃⌘V pastes your last dictation.
Yes. Your audio is sent to Groq (with OpenAI as a backup), turned into text, then deleted. We don't store your recordings. Your history lives on your Mac. No screenshots, no clipboard logging, no tracking inside the app. The full details are in the privacy policy.
No. Vocado needs an internet connection to transcribe. That's how it stays fast and the app stays tiny. If you need offline, an on-device app like MacWhisper, VoiceInk or Superwhisper is a better fit.
86 of them. Auto-detect is tuned for English, so if you mostly dictate in another language, pick it in Settings and accuracy goes way up.
Any Mac on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, Apple Silicon or Intel. It lives in your menu bar and works system-wide through your hotkey.
Fair question. Transcription runs on a paid API, so unlike an offline app there's a real cost every time you dictate. A one-time price doesn't cover that for a heavy user. The trial is there so you can decide if it's worth $4.99 to you before paying anything.
Yes. $39.99 a year, which saves you 33% over paying monthly.
No. It's a direct download from vocado.talk, signed and notarized by Apple, and it updates itself.
Not right now. iOS keyboards can't use the microphone directly, so every dictation keyboard has to bounce you out to its app and back. I'd rather ship one thing that's great than two where one's clunky.
It's quicker, handles long rambles well, keeps a searchable history, and lets you teach it your words. Apple's is fine for the odd message. Vocado is for when you talk all day.
Cancel anytime from the link in your Paddle receipt email. If it's not for you, there's a 14-day money-back guarantee on your first payment. See the refund policy.
14 days free, no card. If it isn't quicker than typing, uninstall it and we're square.