“Free voice to text” gets you a lot of results and most of them have a catch: a web page you copy from, a Chrome-only feature, a trial that ends, or a transcript you spend the saved time fixing. Here’s what’s genuinely free on a Mac and what each costs you in time.
Mac dictation
Free, built in, works in every text field. The cost: it’s a literal transcript. Ums included, punctuation spoken out loud, names guessed. Fine for a sentence. How to turn it on.
Google Docs voice typing
Free, and only in Chrome, only in Docs. Same spoken punctuation. Details and the workaround.
Free online speech to text sites
Speechnotes, Speechtexter, Dictation.io and friends. Free, in a browser, with a box of text you copy and paste. They use the browser’s speech engine, so accuracy is Mac dictation level, and every message you write becomes a copy-paste job.
Free tiers of proper apps
This is the useful category. Speaky Box, Wispr Flow and Lemon all have free tiers that give you the real thing: hold a key, talk, finished text lands in whatever app you’re using.
Speaky Box’s free plan is 2,000 words a week, no card, both keys, every app. Two thousand words is around 40 Slack messages and 10 emails, or a good day’s worth of prompts. If you use it every day you’ll hit the cap and know whether £8.99 a month is worth it. If you don’t, it stays free.
What “free” should mean
Not “free until you type your card in”. Not “free but you copy and paste”. Free should mean: hold a key, talk, and the text is there. Try the free plan and see how far 2,000 words a week gets you.