TL;DR: On-device dictation on a Mac means the speech-to-text model runs on your own hardware. Your audio never leaves your machine, it works offline, and there is nothing on a server to leak, retain, or train on. Infina does this by default: NVIDIA's Parakeet model on the Apple Neural Engine, a flat $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99, with unlimited words and voice commands. And unlike the other on-device apps, it does not chain you to the keyboard: they make you press or hold a key for every dictation, while Infina works hands-free from across the room, just say "type" plus your words, then "send it" (or just "enter"), then switch apps by voice. If privacy is your criterion, the tool to avoid is anything cloud-only.
Local or cloud is the first question. This is the second one, and almost nobody asks it. Infina runs on three spoken triggers and there is no fourth. Say "type" and a sentence and it lands as typed text in whatever app is in front of you. Say "send it", or just "enter", and it presses Enter so the prompt actually goes. Say "open Cursor" or "open Slack" and your computer switches apps for you.
Nothing is held down and nothing is pressed. There is no push-to-talk key to find and no Enter key to reach for two hundred times a day, which is the part every other tool in this category leaves to your hands. Wispr Flow, Superwhisper and the rest all stop at inserting text, which leaves the two keypresses around every prompt exactly where they were.
This article is really about an architecture question you should ask of any dictation tool before you speak a single sensitive sentence into it: where does my voice go?
Why on-device matters: your voice is biometric data
Your voiceprint can identify you the way a fingerprint can. And what you say into a dictation app is the raw feed of your working life: client names, unreleased code, health details, messages you would never paste into a random web form.
With cloud dictation, every one of those sentences is uploaded, processed on someone else's servers, and handled under someone else's retention policy. That is not automatically sinister. But it is a standing risk you carry every day, and most people never read the policy they are trusting.
It is not hypothetical either. Wispr Flow's own data controls page states that unless you enable Privacy Mode, your dictation data may be used to train their AI models, and training is on by default. Achieving zero retention requires turning Privacy Mode on and Cloud Sync off.
To their credit, the controls exist. But the default tells you the architecture: the cloud pipeline is the product, and your data feeds it unless you opt out. Their help docs also confirm there is no offline mode at all. No internet, no dictation.
What you get when the model lives on your Mac
- Privacy by physics, not by policy. Audio that never leaves your device cannot be retained, subpoenaed, breached, or trained on. There is no switch to remember to flip.
- Works offline. Planes, cafés with hostile Wi-Fi, tethered trains, network outages: dictation keeps working, because nothing needed the network in the first place.
- No network latency. No round trip to a server before your words land. On modern Apple Silicon, local models are fast enough that the network is pure overhead.
- No per-word cloud cost passed on to you. Cloud processing costs the vendor money every time you speak, which is why cloud dictation is almost always a subscription with a meter behind it. On-device processing has no per-word cost to pass on, which is why Infina can be flat: $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99, unlimited words, unlimited voice commands.
How Infina does on-device dictation on Mac
For a new user on an Apple Silicon Mac on the yearly plan ($8.25 a month, billed annually at $99), here is exactly where your voice goes: nowhere.
- Transcription runs fully on-device. Infina runs NVIDIA's Parakeet TDT 0.6B speech model on the Apple Neural Engine. Your audio never leaves your Mac, and dictation works with no internet connection at all.
- Text cleanup is on-device too: fast, rule-based formatting rather than a cloud pass.
- Even hands-free listening is local. When hands-free mode is waiting for you to speak, that listening runs on-device, inside the app. Nothing is recorded or sent anywhere while it waits.
- Privacy mode is ON by default: no transcripts and no audio stored server-side. There is nothing to delete because nothing was kept.
The truthful one-liner: by default, Infina transcribes your speech entirely on your Mac, and your audio never leaves your device.
This is also why Infina is built for people who prompt AI tools all day. You can speak thousands of words of prompts without touching the keyboard, privately, offline, on a flat yearly plan ($8.25 a month, billed annually at $99) with no word count to watch. See pricing for what the unlimited plan includes.
The trade-offs, stated plainly
On-device has trade-offs, and we would rather you know them before buying:
- Base output is raw, not polished. On-device cleanup is fast rule-based formatting, not a rewrite. That is deliberate: Infina is built for people prompting AI tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and AI models do not care about comma placement. When you do want client-ready prose, the $5/month cloud add-on (billed annually at $60) does the LLM cleanup.
- The base product is English-only. Other languages require the cloud add-on.
- The optional $5/month cloud add-on IS cloud processing, plainly. It sends audio, encrypted, to our cloud AI providers (Together AI and Groq) for sharper transcription and cleanup by large language models, plus multiple languages. It is opt-in, clearly labeled, and cancel-anytime; the app reverts to fully on-device. You choose per trade-off, and the default is local.
- Apple Silicon required for the Mac's on-device models. Infina also runs on Windows, where the speech model runs on the laptop's own processor. No phone app on either.
- One precision note: privacy mode (on by default) stores nothing. If you manually turn it off to keep a dictation history, transcripts are saved to your account. That is your call, not a default.
Honest alternatives for private dictation on a Mac
Infina is not the only way to keep your voice local, and pretending otherwise would blow the credibility this article runs on.
Superwhisper is a local-first dictation app with a solid reputation: on-device and offline capable, with a free tier of small local models and a $249.99 lifetime option. On price it can come out ahead of us over several years, and we will not pretend otherwise. It is a reasonable local-first alternative if you do not need voice control of the Mac itself or a hands-free loop. Polish is not a reason to leave, though: Infina's $5/month cloud add-on covers polished output. We compare the two directly in Superwhisper vs Infina. And if the local Whisper app you're eyeing is mainly for transcribing recordings rather than live dictation, MacWhisper vs Infina covers that trade-off.
Apple's built-in Dictation is free with your Mac. Per Apple's own documentation, on Apple Silicon Macs general text dictation can be processed on your device rather than sent to Siri servers (Keyboard settings shows this per language; dictation into search boxes still goes to Apple's servers). It is basic, with no app-aware behavior and no voice commands beyond text, but as a private baseline it is underrated. We rank it alongside everything else in best dictation apps for Mac.
Wispr Flow is the big cross-platform option, but it is cloud-only by architecture. There is no on-device mode to switch to. If its 100+ languages and phone apps matter more to you than local processing, that is a legitimate priority ordering; see Wispr Flow vs Infina for the full comparison.
FAQ
Does Infina really work with no internet at all? Yes, for its default mode. Transcription (Parakeet on the Neural Engine), text cleanup, and hands-free listening all run locally, so dictation works on a plane with Wi-Fi off. Only the optional cloud add-on needs a connection.
Is on-device dictation less accurate than cloud dictation? Cloud models are typically larger and sharper on rare names and jargon, which is exactly what Infina's optional add-on buys. For everyday English speech, Infina's on-device accuracy is strong (95%+ for clear speech), and for AI prompting the difference rarely matters.
What data does Infina store about my dictations? By default, none. Privacy mode is on out of the box, so no audio and no transcripts are stored server-side. If you manually turn privacy mode off to keep a history, transcripts are saved to your account.
Is the $5/month cloud add-on required for anything? No. It adds cloud transcription, polished cleanup by large language models, and more languages. The app fully works, transcribing entirely on-device, if you never buy it or cancel it.
Isn't Apple's free dictation enough for private dictation? For casual use, maybe. On Apple Silicon, general text dictation can process on-device. Paid tools earn their price with speed, app-aware workflows, and (in Infina's case) hands-free prompting and Mac voice control on top of private dictation.
The bottom line
Ask one question of any dictation tool: does my audio leave my machine? If the answer is "yes, unless you find the right settings," you are trusting a policy. If the answer is "no, by default," you are trusting physics.
Infina is built on the second answer: on-device by default, offline-capable, nothing stored, with cloud strictly as a labeled, optional add-on. A flat $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99, unlimited words and voice commands, and a 7-day money-back guarantee. Your voice should be yours to place, and with Infina it stays on your Mac.
Where each tool sends your voice, and who it suits
Local or cloud is the first filter. Here is the field again with the reader each one fits.
The tools this page covers (Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, MacWhisper, Apple Dictation) are at the top. The rest of the field follows, because the right answer is sometimes none of the above.
| Tool | Price | Keyboard needed | Pick it if |
|---|---|---|---|
| Infina | $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99, unlimited words and unlimited commands | No. Speak "type", speak the prompt, say "send it" or "enter". | you want to prompt AI tools without touching the keyboard. Say "type" and the words go in, "send it" and the prompt goes, "open Cursor" and you are in the next agent. It is the only one of these that finishes the whole loop by voice in the tools developers prompt in all day. |
| Wispr Flow | $15 a month, or $144 a year billed annually | Yes. A key to start dictating, Enter to send. | you need dictation on an iPhone or an Android phone as well as a laptop, or you write in one of 100+ languages. Those are the two things Infina does not ship. |
| Superwhisper | $8.49 a month, $84.99 a year, or $249.99 once | Yes. A key to start dictating, Enter to send. | you want to pick and swap the speech model yourself, and dictation into a text box is the whole job. It stops where the text box ends: there is no spoken send, and no spoken app switch. |
| MacWhisper | 65 euros, paid once | Yes. A key to start dictating, Enter to send. | the job is transcribing recorded audio files rather than talking to your computer while you work. |
| Apple Dictation | free, built in | Yes. A key to start dictating, Enter to send. | you dictate a sentence here and there and do not want to install anything. |
| VoiceInk | $25 to $49, paid once | Yes. A key to start dictating, Enter to send. | you want plain local dictation at the smallest possible price and you never need your voice to control the machine. |
| Talon | free | No, once you have learned its command language. | you want to drive the entire computer by voice, cursor and clicks included, and you are willing to learn a command language to get there. Talon is the serious hands-free tool on this list. Infina goes after the same freedom with three ordinary English words instead of a syntax to learn. |
The part that is actually different: zero keypresses
The mainstream dictation apps (Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, MacWhisper, VoiceInk, Apple Dictation) are all push-to-talk: you hold or press a key to start talking, and you press Enter to send. That is two physical acts on every single prompt. A hundred prompts in a day is two hundred keypresses that exist only to start and stop the tool. Infina removes both of them. Nothing is held, nothing is pressed, and the same loop runs on three spoken words.
There are three triggers and there is no fourth. "type" types, "send it" sends, "open" opens and switches apps. The send trigger answers to either wording, "send it" or a plain "enter", whichever you find yourself saying. That is the entire vocabulary: no command language, no grammar, no custom scripts to write, nothing to memorize beyond those three words.
When Infina is not the answer. If you need dictation on an iPhone, an iPad, an Android phone or Linux, Infina is a Mac and Windows desktop app and there is no phone version. Wispr Flow covers phones.
Everywhere else, the difference is the loop. Every other tool in that table types words into a box and stops, leaving your hands to press Enter and pick the next window. Infina finishes it: say "type" and your sentence, say "send it" (or just "enter"), say "open Cursor", and keep going without a key.