Best dictation software for Windows

The thirteen, in one table

We put ours first, and the question it answers is a narrow one: you dictate all day, into whatever window is in front of you, on a Windows PC, and you would rather your voice stayed on it. The other twelve are listed alphabetically after it rather than scored against each other — the paragraphs below the table say what each one is for, because "second best" depends entirely on what you need. The table is generated from the same files our comparison pages read, so every figure is whatever its maker last said it was.

If your need is a different one — controlling the whole computer by voice, transcribing audio files you already have, minuting a call you cannot attend — this ranking is the wrong one for you, and the paragraphs below say which tool is the right one.

Why Deixis is first, and the reasons in plain words

Recognition happens inside the app, on your own processor. The recording, the model and the transcript stay on the machine, on every plan and under every setting. There is no mode that uploads your audio, so on that point there is nothing to trust us about.

There is no account. You install it, you press a key, you talk. Nothing local is metered or gated behind a sign-in: all dictation, both speech models, the dictionary and its five vocabulary packs, meeting recording and transcription, screen grabs, screen recording, your own buttons and your own webhooks. Free permanently, not free until we change our minds about the free tier.

One key, everywhere. Hold Ctrl+Win, speak, let go, and clean text lands at the caret of whatever has focus, with your clipboard handed back. The key that writes your commit message writes your email, your ticket and the search box. It punctuates for where it is going, because the name of the app and the field travel with your words — never the window title, and never anything on your screen.

The things beyond dictation are the real reason it is first. Double-tap the key for free mode and it keeps listening while you drag a region of the screen or pick a control, then writes one note that interleaves what you said with what you pointed at. Ctrl+Win+S freezes the screen for a grab you can annotate. Ctrl+Win+V records the screen, and what you said in it is transcribed on your machine; a title and a short summary are written for you if you have given Deixis a language model, on your own machine or in its cloud. Handing the recording to somebody as a link is the one part that needs a Deixis account, and the person opening the link needs nothing. Ctrl+Win+M records a meeting — your microphone and the system output both — and transcribes it locally with no key and no network. It tells the remote voices apart and remembers the ones you name, and the voiceprint that does it stays on the machine, is never uploaded, and can be deleted per person.

And it is yours to extend. A button on the palette can run a program with your finished note and type back whatever it prints, so filing a ticket by voice ends with the ticket's key at your caret. Any finished note, grab or translation can be posted to a URL you own, signed so your receiver can verify it. Everything it makes is an ordinary file in a folder you own.

Where recognition runs on your own PC

Whisperstream is the closest thing on this page to what we build, and it is good. Its strongest advantage over us is languages: it dictates in 39 of them, on the CPU, where we do English and nothing else. It also downloads a small cleanup model into the app, so polishing your prose with a language model needs no key and no server running — with Deixis that is a setup step. If you dictate in more than one language and want it all local, try this one first.

Dragon Professional does the thing none of the new tools do: it controls Windows. Custom voice commands and macros, word lists shared across a community of users, batch transcription of audio files you already have, and a management centre for rolling it out across an organisation. If you need voice to operate the computer rather than fill in a text box, or you are deploying to a hundred desks, this is a category we do not compete in.

Talon is built for people with limited or no use of their hands, and its own docs say so first. It aims at full desktop proficiency by voice — programming, the command line, games — with every command a script you or the community wrote, and eye tracking with a Tobii tracker for the pointing half. Deixis asks you to hold a key, which is the assumption Talon exists to remove. If holding a key is the problem, Talon is the answer and we are not.

The tools that recognise in the cloud

These send your audio out to be recognised, at least by default. That is a real trade, not only a cost: it buys models we cannot fit on your machine, and it is why each of them does something we cannot. Two of them, Willow and Superwhisper, also offer a local option — said so below.

Wispr Flow is the smoothest at following you between devices, desktop and phone alike, and its dictionary can learn from the corrections you make rather than waiting for you to add words by hand. Once the account is made there is very little to set up.

Willow Voice is best at the step after dictation: Scribe turns a rough spoken description into finished prose, which is a different promise from tidying up what you actually said. It also has shortcuts that expand a phrase into a longer saved text, and a shared dictionary for a team on the team plan. Its help centre lists offline dictation on the paid individual plan, without saying which platforms carry it.

Aqua Voice feels the fastest, because Realtime Mode — on its top plan — puts words on the screen while you are still talking instead of at the end. It also takes standing custom instructions for how your text should read, and publishes an API for its speech model.

Typeless gives you a tone per application and an "Ask anything" mode on top of plain dictation, with a generous free allowance to find out whether that suits you.

Superwhisper is the one built for rolling out to a company: single sign-on, deployment through Jamf or Intune, and control over which models people may use. Its custom modes let you write your own instructions and choose what context each mode may see, which is more control than we give you, and one licence covers all its platforms. It can transcribe with a local Whisper model rather than in the cloud, and its free tier includes the smaller ones; its security docs say local language models are Mac-only, so on Windows its AI modes are still cloud calls. Its own Windows docs list several features as not there yet.

The built-in one, the Mac ones, and the meeting one

Windows Voice Typing is Win+H and it is already on your PC. Nothing to install, nothing to pay, nothing to configure, and for occasional dictation into a document that is a genuinely reasonable answer — the right first thing to try before you spend anything. Two things Microsoft's own page says about it: it uses online speech recognition and needs an internet connection, and there is no way to add your own words and no custom commands.

MacWhisper and VoiceInk are Mac software, and we list them because half the roundups you will find recommend Mac apps to Windows readers without saying so. MacWhisper takes an audio or video file and hands you a transcript, which Deixis cannot do at all, and it connects to nine providers under your own keys. VoiceInk is the open one: the source is published under GPL v3 and you can build it yourself, and its modes switch automatically by application, by website domain or by a phrase you speak.

Otter.ai is not a dictation tool and does not pretend to be. It is the best answer here to a meeting you cannot attend: its notetaker joins Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams from your calendar as a visible participant, and everything lands in a searchable shared workspace with sharing into Slack. Deixis records a meeting you are in, on your machine, and nothing joins anything. Different jobs.

Who should not choose Deixis

If you dictate in anything but English, stop here. Our speech models are English models. That is the single biggest gap on this page and several tools above close it.

If you want to hand it a file, it will not take one. Deixis transcribes what it records — your dictation, your meetings, your screen recordings — and there is no drop-a-file transcription in it. Dragon does that on Windows, as does Superwhisper on its paid plan; MacWhisper and VoiceInk do it on a Mac.

If you are on Linux, there is no build and none is planned.

If your PC predates 2013, it will not run. The speech engine is compiled against an instruction set that arrived that year, so an older processor stops with an error rather than running slowly.

If you need a particular tool's integration — a calendar link, a bot that attends calls, single sign-on, a management console, a specific cloud provider — buy the tool that has it. And if you want words appearing as you speak, or a tool that reads the text around your cursor, we do neither.