The Apple Dictation alternative that does not time out.

It stops when you were not finished

The complaint that sends most people here is not accuracy, it is that dictation ends on its own part way through a thought. macOS has a setting for it, under System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, and it is worth turning off before you install anything: Apple's own support page for dictation is the place to check what your version calls it.

Zumbo has no timeout of its own. Hold your shortcut and it listens until you let go, or tap to start and tap again to stop. A long paragraph is one press.

Start with what it does well

Apple Dictation is part of macOS, it costs nothing, and on an Apple silicon Mac Apple states that it runs on device. For a reply, a search box or a note to yourself, that is a complete answer and there is no reason to install anything. This page is about the work where it is not.

It has no vocabulary you can teach

This is the one that sends people looking. A general speech model spells what it thinks it heard, and what it thinks it heard is drawn from ordinary language. So a library name becomes two English words, a drug name becomes something close to it, a case citation becomes a street address. There is nowhere to tell it otherwise. The macOS text replacement list is not the same thing: it swaps strings after the fact, so it can fix a term you can predict, and it does nothing for the ones you cannot.

In your note

Ship the Q3 roadmap before Friday.

Teach Zumbo this word

Heard ascue three Should beQ3

Replace here Replace everywhere and teach

Zumbo solves it from both ends. Twenty one vocabulary packs cover fields like developer tools, legal, medical, design and marketing, and you turn on the ones that match your work. Then when a word does come out wrong you select it, type what you meant and press Teach. From then on it is heard your way, and the correction stays on your Mac.

It does not know which application you are in

Dictating into a terminal is not the same as dictating into an email. One wants commands and flags, the other wants sentences and punctuation. The built in dictation treats both the same way. Zumbo carries the vocabulary you chose into whatever application has the cursor, which is why a commit message and a client email can come out of the same key.

There is nowhere for the words to live

Apple Dictation writes into whatever field you are in and then it is gone. There is no history, no search, nothing you can come back to. Zumbo keeps everything it typed, searchable, on the Mac. You can press New note and talk without pasting anywhere, and if you say a time it becomes a reminder: say remind me to call Dana tomorrow at ten and there is a reminder for tomorrow at ten.

It does not do meetings

Dictation is one voice at a time into one field. It is not built to sit through a meeting. Zumbo has a meeting mode that transcribes the room through the microphone, live, with a timestamp for each paragraph and each speaker labelled, and it never leaves the Mac. Otter, Fireflies and Krisp promise not to misuse your meeting data; Zumbo never receives it.

Speed is the quiet one

The reason people stop using dictation is rarely a dramatic failure. It is the half second of hesitation, the sentence that arrives after you have already started typing it. Zumbo composes locally in about a fifth of a second, which is under the threshold where you start second guessing it. That is the difference between a feature you have and a tool you use.

What this costs

Fifteen dollars once for one Mac, twenty for three, seventy nine for ten. Free updates, a three day trial with everything unlocked and no card. Apple Dictation stays exactly where it is, and plenty of people use both.

Related: how Zumbo keeps your voice on your Mac, the Mac dictation apps side by side, and dictation with the Wi-Fi off, and the 21 vocabulary packs.