macOS Dictation vs SnailText — an honest comparison

It is not true that macOS Dictation always sends your voice to Apple, and we are not going to repeat that claim to make ourselves look better - even though most comparison pages in this category do.

On a Mac with Apple silicon, general text dictation - composing a message, writing a note - is processed on the device for many languages, and needs no internet connection. That is Apple's own documentation, and for those cases the privacy comparison between us and the built-in feature is close to a tie.

What is true, and is the actual difference, is that it is conditional and the conditions are not visible while you work. It depends on the Mac, on the language, and on the context: dictating into a search box uses server-based dictation even when general text does not. Apple's answer to "which am I getting?" is to open Keyboard settings and look.

SnailText does not have a server path to fall back to. There is one behaviour, it is the local one, and it does not change based on which field your cursor is in. If that certainty is what you are buying, that is what you are buying - not a privacy claim the free option already meets much of the time.

The duration limit is gone, but the silence cutoff is not, and the two get conflated constantly. Apple's page states both things a sentence apart: "You can dictate text of any length without a timeout", and "Dictation stops automatically when no speech is detected for 30 seconds". So you can speak for an hour - as long as you never pause for half a minute.

That second half is the one that bites in practice, because a pause to think is indistinguishable from a pause because you finished. There is no setting to extend it. Dictating a long paragraph means restarting when your own composing pauses end the session. SnailText records until you press stop, which is the difference that actually shows up in use.

"Enhanced Dictation" is also gone. That was the Mojave-era checkbox for downloading an offline model, and it has not been how this works for years. On modern Apple silicon Macs, on-device processing for general text is the default behaviour for supported languages, not a toggle you go and enable.

Both of these matter for a practical reason: if a comparison page is wrong about the easily-checkable things, you have no reason to trust it on the rest. The genuine gaps are the silence cutoff, language reach, cross-platform reach, custom vocabulary, and knowing which processing path you are on.

Apple keeps language support on its macOS Feature Availability page rather than stating a number in the Dictation article, and the languages that support dictation are not the same set as the languages that support on-device dictation. You may find that your language works but goes to Apple's servers, which is exactly the case where people assume they are covered and are not.

We are not going to quote a count for Apple. Tallies of their availability page circulate as though they were Apple figures, and they are not. The honest statement is that Apple maintains separate lists and you should check yours against the specific feature you care about.

SnailText runs Whisper across 99 languages, all processed locally, and we document measured accuracy language by language rather than claiming it is even. Some of those languages we handle very well and some middling, and the per-language pages say which is which.