Every Mac has speech to text built in. It’s called Dictation, it’s free, and most people don’t know it’s there. Here’s how to turn it on, the shortcut, what it’s good and bad at, and what to use when you outgrow it.
Turn on dictation on a Mac
- Open System Settings, then Keyboard.
- Scroll to Dictation and switch it on.
- Pick the shortcut. The default is pressing the microphone key (or fn) twice, but you can choose Control twice or another key.
- Choose your language. On Apple silicon Macs, English runs on the device.
That’s it. Put your cursor in any text field, press the shortcut, and talk. Press it again to stop.
The voice to text Mac shortcut
By default it’s the fn or globe key pressed twice. Change it under System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, Shortcut. If you’d rather hold a key than press twice, Mac dictation can’t do that; hold-to-talk is one of the reasons people move to a third-party app.
What Mac speech to text is good at
It’s free, it works offline for English on recent Macs, and it’s fine for a sentence in Notes or a quick reply in Messages. Recognition on clear speech is decent.
Where it falls short
It types what you said, literally. Ums, false starts and “no, actually” all go in.
You say the punctuation. “Comma”, “full stop”, “new paragraph”. Forget one and you get a wall of words.
Names and jargon are guesses. The on-device model is small. Product names, colleagues and technical terms come out wrong, and there’s no proper way to teach it.
Same output everywhere. A Slack message and a Claude prompt come out identical.
The better option for a MacBook
Third-party dictation apps run your speech through a large speech model, then a language model, and hand you finished text: punctuated, ums removed, grammar fixed, names spelt from a list you control. Speaky Box does this with a key you hold, works in every app, and has a second key that writes a proper prompt in Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor and an email in Mail. Free for 2,000 words a week.
The full comparison with Mac dictation has a side-by-side table if you want the detail. The short version: use the built-in one for the odd sentence; use an app if you write.
Common questions
Does Mac dictation work offline? For English on Apple silicon, yes. Other languages may use Apple’s servers.
Why does my Mac dictation stop after a few seconds? Older macOS versions had a time limit. Update to a recent macOS, or use a hold-to-talk app which records for as long as you hold the key.
Can I dictate into Word or Google Docs on a Mac? Yes with the built-in dictation, and yes with Speaky Box, which also handles Google Docs in any browser and Word.