I’ve been experimenting with VoiceInk for the past couple of weeks, and decided to purchase a license after comparing it to a bunch of other tools on the market, most of which were subscription-based. I was pleased that it’s open source, a one-time license fee, and feels well designed and maintained.
I also like that it is predominantly local in its processing, but also has the option for AI enhancement. You can add an OpenAI or Anthropic or a number of other providers’ API keys and get the on-device transcription polished up automatically. If the enhancement fails, it falls back on the local model’s output. And it keeps a nice history of what has been transcribed. So if the text doesn’t get put into the field, I can go back and copy and paste from the history. It even will store the audio for a brief time.
I was reluctant to purchase a license because I feel like in short time Apple will upgrade their native dictation and theirs will become comparable in comprehension, while benefitting from the tighter integration. But given that VoiceInk is less than the cost of a couple of months of some of the other dictation tools with monthly subscriptions, I was happy to support it and have something to use in the meantime. And I may just come to depend on its additional functionality and history and so forth.
One significant downside is that it doesn’t have an iOS app, but many of the tools I looked at did not. An iOS app would presumably require switching back and forth between the dictation app and the text input anyway. But so far I’ve been extremely happy just using this on my laptop.