TL;DR: Push to talk dictation on Mac is the hold-a-key model: hold a hotkey, speak, release, and your words appear wherever your cursor is. Infina does it with a single held Option key, transcribed entirely on your Mac, in any app, for $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99 (as of July 2026) with a 7-day refund. It is also the only dictation app where the hotkey is optional: flip on hands-free mode and you can lean back with your coffee, say "type" plus your words, say "send it" (or just "enter") to submit, and switch apps by voice from a few feet away, no keys involved. Push to talk is the floor. Hands-free is the ceiling. Infina is the one app with both.
One thing to hold in mind while you read the rankings below. 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.
What push to talk dictation actually is
Push to talk borrows its name from radio: press to transmit, release to stop. On a Mac it means one held key stands between silence and text.
Hold the key, and the microphone is live. Speak. Release, and your words are typed where your cursor is, in whatever app has focus.
That is the whole model, and it is the interaction that made modern Mac dictation click. No window to open. No record button to hunt for. No wondering whether the mic is still on: your thumb knows, because it is either holding the key or it is not.
Compare that with the old way: open a dictation panel, click record, speak into a box, copy the result, paste it where it belongs. Push to talk collapses five steps into one gesture, and the text lands at the cursor instead of taking a detour through a window.
How Infina's push to talk dictation works on Mac
Infina keeps it to one key:
- Hold Option (⌥). The mic goes live the instant you press.
- Speak. A sentence, a fragment, a 300-word prompt, whatever you have.
- Release. Infina types the transcription at your cursor.
It works system-wide: Notes, Mail, Slack, Safari, Cursor, a terminal running Claude Code. If a cursor can blink there, Infina can type there. No per-app extensions, no allowlist to configure.
There is a second held key for a different job. Hold fn and speak a voice command instead of dictation: open an app, switch windows or tabs, press Enter. Dictation writes; commands act.
Under the hood, transcription runs entirely on your Mac. The Parakeet speech model runs on the Apple Neural Engine, so your audio never leaves your device, dictation works offline, and accuracy is 95%+ for clear speech.
The output is raw by design: what you said, cleanly formatted, without an AI rewriting pass. That is deliberate, because Infina is built for people prompting AI tools all day, and Claude Code does not grade your prose. When you do want polished, publish-ready output, the optional cloud add-on ($5/month billed annually at $60 with a 7-day trial) brings large language model cleanup and more languages through our cloud AI providers (Together AI and Groq).
The honest landscape: everyone holds a key
Here is the truthful market picture, as of July 4, 2026: push to talk is the standard interaction in this category. Wispr Flow is hotkey-driven. Superwhisper is hotkey-driven. Apple's built-in dictation starts from a keyboard shortcut. Comparing Mac dictation apps mostly means comparing which key you hold and what happens to your audio after you release it.
That is not a criticism. Hold-to-talk is a genuinely great interaction: instant, deliberate, impossible to trigger by accident. The real differences live elsewhere:
| Infina | Typical subscription dictation app | |
|---|---|---|
| Trigger | Hold Option | Hold a hotkey |
| Where audio goes | Stays on your Mac by default | Cloud processing |
| Works offline | Yes | Usually not |
| Pricing | $8.25/month, billed annually at $99 (as of July 2026) | Around $15 per month, about $180 a year |
| Metering | Flat: unlimited words and voice commands | Per seat, per month |
| After the hotkey | Hands-free mode: dictate, send, and switch apps by voice | The hotkey is the ceiling |
The subscription apps sell AI polish as the reason to pay monthly. We do not concede that trade. Infina's cloud add-on ($5/month billed annually, 7-day free trial) puts large cloud transcription models and LLM cleanup on top of an app that already transcribes on your Mac, which beats the $15/month apps at their own game while staying entirely optional. Switch it off and Infina still works, offline, at full speed.
For a full survey of the field, see our guide to Mac dictation software in 2026. And if a specific competitor's shortcut matters to you, check their official pages; shortcuts change, and ours is one held Option key.
Push to talk is the floor, not the ceiling
Now the part that makes Infina different, because everything above describes the whole category.
Every push to talk app chains you to the keyboard. Not to typing, but to the keyboard itself: your hand comes back for every single dictation, then again for Enter, then again for Cmd-Tab. Hundreds of times a day, the hotkey quietly reattaches you to the desk.
Infina is the one app where you can graduate. Double-tap Cmd and hands-free mode turns on. Now you can stand up, walk to the other side of the desk, pick up your sandwich, and keep working:
- Say "type" plus your words, and Infina types them. The word "type" itself is the trigger; there is no key.
- Say "send it", and Infina presses Enter.
- Say "open Notes" (or "open Cursor", or "open Claude Code"), and you are in the next app.
It is built to hear you from two to three feet away or more, which is what turns dictation from a keyboard shortcut into a way of working. Hands-free ships off by default and is labeled experimental; push to talk is the mature mode you can always fall back to, since hold-Option keeps working regardless.
We cover the full mechanics, and the honest fine print, in hands-free dictation on Mac.
The practical upshot: with other apps, choosing push to talk means choosing a permanent interaction model. With Infina, it is where you start.
What it costs
Infina's unlimited plan is $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99, as of July 2026 (the price rises as launch seats sell), including every update. It is flat: unlimited words and unlimited voice commands, no per-word meter, no per-seat maths. There is a Free plan of 2,000 free words, no card required; after that there is a 7-day no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, so you can try it risk-free on your own Mac, in your own apps, with your own accent.
The optional cloud add-on is $5/month billed annually with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime and the app simply reverts to on-device transcription.
What that covers, for a tool you trigger hundreds of times a day, is its own story: see how Infina's pricing compares, and the current numbers on pricing.
Honest limits
- Mac and Windows, no phone app. On a Mac the on-device models need Apple Silicon. Windows gets voice typing, hands-free, and the commands that drive the computer; reading your screen and rewriting selected text stay Mac-only. See Infina for Windows.
- English only in the base product. The cloud add-on adds more languages; if you mostly dictate in another language, factor that in.
- Raw output by design. Perfect for prompts, notes, and messages; for publish-ready prose you will want the add-on's LLM cleanup.
- The Free plan has a cap. It is 2,000 free words, so heavy users reach the cap quickly; the 7-day refund window covers you after you buy.
FAQ
What is push to talk dictation on a Mac? It means holding a key to record and releasing it to have your speech typed at your cursor, in whatever app has focus. It is the standard interaction for Mac dictation apps, and in Infina the key is Option.
What key does Infina use for push to talk dictation? Hold Option (⌥) to dictate; release to insert the text at your cursor. Hold fn instead to speak a voice command, like opening an app or switching tabs.
Does push to talk dictation work in every Mac app? Yes. Infina types at the OS level into whatever app has focus: editors, terminals, browsers, chat apps. There are no per-app plugins to install.
Does my audio leave my Mac when I dictate? Not by default. Transcription runs on-device on the Apple Neural Engine and works offline. Cloud processing exists only as an optional $5/month add-on, handled by our cloud AI providers (Together AI and Groq).
Can I dictate on a Mac without holding any key? Yes, and this is Infina's signature move: double-tap Cmd to turn on hands-free mode, then say "type" plus your words, "send it" to press Enter, and "open" plus an app name to switch apps by voice.
How much does Infina cost? $8.25 a month, billed annually at $99 (as of July 2026), with a 7-day no-questions-asked refund and every update included. That is flat, with unlimited words and unlimited voice commands, and the $5/month cloud add-on stays optional.
The bottom line
Push to talk is the interaction that made Mac dictation click: hold Option, speak, release, and the text is already where it belongs. Infina does that slice as well as it can be done, on-device, offline, in any app, for a flat $99 a year (as of July 2026) instead of around $180.
And when holding a key starts to feel like the last wire tying you to the desk, you will not need a different app. Double-tap Cmd, pick up your coffee, and say "type".
The short answer, by what you are trying to do
If you want to skip the detail above, find your sentence in this table and buy that one.
The tools this page covers (Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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.