MacWhisper transcribes your files. Deixis types where your cursor is.
You have a Mac, you have MacWhisper or you are weighing it up, and what you actually want is to stop typing. MacWhisper is a transcription app first: hand it a recording and it hands back text and subtitles. Dictation is one item on its menu, and the parts that polish what you dictate, grammar improvement and AI prompts, are on Pro. Deixis is built the other way round. Dictation is the product.
Hold Ctrl+Option, speak, let go. Tidy text lands at the caret of whatever app has focus, Mail,
Slack, Notes, a terminal, a pull request, and your clipboard is put back the way you left it. The
speech is recognised on the Mac itself and the audio never leaves it. There is no account to make,
and everything that runs on your Mac is free.
MacWhisper is very good at the job it was built for, and if your day is transcribing interviews or recording calls, the list below says so without hedging. If your day is writing, email, messages, documents, prompts, here is the case for Deixis on the Mac you already have.
Why switch
What you gain, and what you give up
Why Deixis
- Dictation is the product, not one tab of it. Hold the chord, talk, release, and the text is typed where you were working. The chord is live from the first launch, with no dictation feature to enable and no shortcut to set up, both of which MacWhisper's docs ask of you first. Double-tap the chord instead and Deixis keeps listening until you double-tap again, for the paragraph you are still thinking your way through.
- Tidy text without paying or setting anything up. Deixis tidies your dictation on your Mac with rules, with no key, no provider and no licence. MacWhisper's own pricing table puts automatic grammar improvement, high-quality dictation and dictating with AI prompts on Pro, and its dictation docs say those AI features also need an AI provider of your own.
- It knows where the words are going. When cleanup does ask a language model for help, Deixis sends the name of the app and the field along with your sentence, so a commit message, a chat reply and an email body each come back shaped for where they are going, with nothing to configure. MacWhisper reaches something similar with app-specific prompts, which you write yourself, on Pro.
- Dictation comes with the download. Deixis for the Mac is one notarized disk image, and dictating into any app is the first thing it does. MacWhisper's docs say dictation into any text field is only in the copy sold on its own website; the Mac App Store version, called Whisper Transcription, leaves it out because of Apple's rules for the store. If you bought it there, you do not have system-wide dictation.
- Talk and point in one note. Double-tap for free mode and narrate while you take the text you have selected or grab a region of the screen, from a small toolbar at the cursor. Your words and the things you pointed at arrive together as one note, pasted where you finish and saved as a file: a bug report or a set of instructions in one breath.
- Screen grabs and screen recording, on the same chord.
Ctrl+Option+Sfreezes the screen: drag a region, add arrows, boxes, text and numbered steps, pixelate anything private, and save a PNG that stays re-editable.Ctrl+Option+Vrecords the screen to a video file on your Mac, with pause and stop on a small bar while it runs. MacWhisper does neither. - Nothing about you leaves. Deixis needs no account, and has no telemetry, no analytics and no crash reports. It makes two calls on its own, an update check at launch and a check for an announcement when you open Settings, and neither carries anything but the request. MacWhisper's privacy policy says it can send anonymous analytics about your licence status.
- Plain files in a folder on your Mac. Free-mode notes, annotated grabs and screen recordings are ordinary files, kept beside your dictionary and your settings. They open in whatever you like, and they outlive the app if you ever remove it.
Where MacWhisper still wins
- Files and subtitles. Drop in an MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, Opus, MOV or MP4 and get a transcript,
with
.srtand.vttsubtitles, on the free tier. Pro adds batch transcription, YouTube and media links, and a file per speaker for podcasts. Deixis transcribes what you say to it, live, and will not take a file you made somewhere else. - Meetings on the Mac. With Pro, MacWhisper records Zoom, Teams, Webex, Skype, Chime and Discord calls, notices when a meeting starts and ends, and tells the speakers apart. Deixis records and transcribes meetings on Windows and on Android, not yet on the Mac.
- A hundred languages. MacWhisper transcribes in 100 languages, and Pro translates the result. Deixis works in English only, because its speech models are English models.
- Pay once. Pro is a single €64 purchase with lifetime updates, and a personal licence covers your own devices. Deixis is free for everything that runs on your Mac and charges only for its cloud extras, by subscription.
- Automation. On Pro, watched folders transcribe files as they arrive, finished transcripts can go on to Notion, Zapier, Obsidian, n8n, Make.com or a webhook of your own, and a command-line tool drives it from scripts. On the Mac, Deixis has none of that: its custom buttons and webhooks are on Windows today.
- A menu of AI providers. With Pro, MacWhisper talks to OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, xAI, Azure, DeepSeek, Google, OpenRouter, any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or a local model through Ollama or LM Studio, with a different prompt per app if you write one. Deixis keeps the choice to one setting, and there is no prompt for you to write.
What you get
More than dictation, on your Mac.
Hold Ctrl+Option and speak, or press a letter while you hold it: free mode, a grab, a screen recording. All of it on your Mac, all of it free, none of it behind an account.
Dictation, where your cursor is
Hold Ctrl+Option, speak, release. Clean, punctuated text lands in whatever app has focus on your Mac, with your clipboard handed back.
Free mode: talk and point
Double-tap the chord and narrate for as long as you like while you grab a region or take a selection. One note, what you said interleaved with what you pointed at, pasted where you finish and saved as Markdown.
Screen grabs, annotated
Freeze the screen at the keypress, drag a region, add arrows, boxes, text and numbered steps, and pixelate what is private. Saved as a PNG in a folder you own.
Screen recording
Record the screen, pause when you need to, and stop. The video is a file in a folder on your Mac, not in somebody else's cloud.
Side by side
MacWhisper and Deixis, side by side
| Row | Deixis | MacWhisper |
|---|---|---|
| Runs on | Mac, on Apple Silicon with macOS 13 or later, and the same app on Windows 10 and 11 and on Android, with an iPhone keyboard in beta on TestFlight. One engine on all of them, and dictation audio never leaves the device. | macOS, iPhone and iPad, as a separate App Store edition |
| Speech recognition happens | On your own device, inside the app, on every platform. Your audio never leaves it. | On your device or in the cloud, your choice |
| AI cleanup happens | On your device, with no provider at all. Or, if you want more, Deixis's cloud, your own Ollama, or your own key. Your choice, in one setting. | On your device or in the cloud, your choice |
| Leaves your machine | Text only, and only once you switch a cloud feature on. Never audio, never screenshots, never window titles. | Nothing |
| Account needed | None, ever, for anything that runs on your device. The cloud extras have a seven-day trial you start with an email code. No card. | not documented |
| Price | Free forever for everything that runs on your Mac. Pro is $49 a year for the cloud extras with nothing to set up; on a Mac, that is cloud cleanup. | Free tier: free forever, with file transcription in 100 languages, subtitles and system-wide dictation; cleanup, grammar improvement, AI prompts, speaker recognition and meeting recording are Pro; €64 one-time |
| Your transcripts live | In plain files, in one folder you own and can back up. Uninstall Deixis and every note is still readable. | On your device |
| Make it yours | Your own dictionary of the names and jargon you use, in its own window. Custom buttons and webhooks are on Windows today, not yet on the Mac. | On Pro, your own API keys for OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, xAI, Azure, DeepSeek, Google, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, or local models through Ollama and LM Studio, with prompts per app; watched folders, transcripts sent on to Notion, Zapier, Obsidian, n8n, Make.com or a webhook, and a command-line tool |
MacWhisper facts from macwhisper.com, its privacy policy, its docs, its dictation docs, its App Store version docs and its licensing docs, read on 27 September 2026. “Not documented” means those pages did not say.
MacWhisper's default is local Whisper models on the Mac. Connecting a cloud transcription or language-model provider with your own key sends that audio or text to the provider you chose, which is your decision rather than the vendor's; the rows above describe the default. It is sold two ways: MacWhisper, downloaded from its own site, and Whisper Transcription, on the Mac App Store with weekly, monthly or yearly subscriptions. Its docs say dictation into any text field is only in the version from its own site, because of App Store restrictions. The AI features in dictation need a Pro licence and your own AI key. A personal Pro licence covers your own devices, with a soft limit of three. Its home page carries two pricing tables, one for wide screens and one for phones, and they do not match row for row: the phone table marks meeting recording and meeting detection as not on the free tier, and the wide one leaves that free cell blank; both tick them for Pro, so they are counted as Pro here.
What leaves your machine, and what leaves theirs
Deixis publishes every byte it sends, as a table, because there is so little of it. Here is that table beside what MacWhisper's own pages say.
| What | Deixis | MacWhisper |
|---|---|---|
| Audio | Never. Recognition happens inside the app on your device; the recording, the model and the transcript stay there. | Nothing, by default: the privacy policy says no data, audio, text or other, leaves your device. Audio goes to a cloud transcription provider only if you connect one under your own key.a provider you choose, if any · only when you connect one |
| The dictated text | The sentence you just dictated, your vocabulary, and your previous sentence in that fieldthe endpoint you chose · only with a cloud endpoint set, and by default only when the local rules are not enough | Nothing, by default. With a language-model provider connected under your own key, the transcript goes to it for the AI features.a provider you choose, if any · only when you use an AI feature with a cloud provider |
| Context around the text | The names of the app and the field the text is going into. Never the window title, never a screenshot.the same endpoint · with that request | not documented |
| Telemetry and analytics | None. No account, no telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports. | Anonymous licensing-related analytics, to verify a valid licencethe vendor · not stated |
| Update check | Nothing but the request; the version check happens on your Macapi.deixis-voice.com · every launch, and when you ask in Settings | not documented |
| Model download | Nothing but the requesthuggingface.co · once, when you press Download on first run | not documented |
| Account and sign-in | An email address, only if you choose to start the trial, plus the partner tag from a partner download link and the first partner website that connected to Deixis on this computer, if there are anythe Deixis endpoint · when you start the trial | not documented |
| Integrations | Nothing: webhooks are on Windows today, not yet on the Mac | Your transcripts, if you set up an automatic upload to Notion, Zapier, Obsidian, n8n, Make.com or a webhook of your ownthe destination you set up · automatically, only once you set one up |
Before you switch
Before you switch
Who should not switch
If most of your hours go into turning recordings into text, interviews, lectures, podcasts, subtitles, keep MacWhisper, because Deixis will not open a file you hand it. If you dictate in a language other than English, Deixis is not your tool yet. If you want meetings recorded on this Mac, MacWhisper does it and the Deixis Mac build does not. If your Mac has an Intel processor, Deixis will not run: it needs Apple silicon and macOS 13 or later. And if your transcripts feed Notion or a script automatically, that plumbing is MacWhisper's. None of this is either-or, though: nothing stops you keeping MacWhisper for files and using Deixis for everything you type.
Making the switch
About five minutes from download to your first dictated sentence.
Installing
Deixis comes as a notarized disk image: open it and drag Deixis to Applications. The first launch asks you to press Download once for the speech model; until that finishes, dictation says so rather than failing quietly. The first time you dictate, macOS asks for Accessibility and microphone access, and the first screen grab asks for Screen Recording. Grant each in System Settings → Privacy & Security. Updates arrive in the app, under Settings → Updates.
The shortcut
MacWhisper's dictation starts from a shortcut you set in its settings. Deixis's works from the
first launch: hold Ctrl+Option to talk, release to type. Holding is the push-to-talk, so there is
nothing to switch on. If you keep MacWhisper for files, give its dictation shortcut something that
does not use Ctrl+Option, or turn its dictation off, so only one app is listening when you hold
the keys.
Cleanup, in place of prompts
MacWhisper's dictation prompts, and the per-app prompts on top of them, have no counterpart to write in Deixis. There is one control instead, Settings → Cleanup, and it decides how often a language model is asked. Left at When it helps, rules on your Mac tidy almost everything and a model is only consulted when you ask for a transform ("make this a bullet list") or dictate a long stretch that comes out with no punctuation. Every time hands every sentence to the model for smoother prose, at the cost of a moment's wait; Never keeps dictation entirely on the Mac. The model can be Deixis's cloud (the Pro subscription), one you run on your own Mac, or your own key. What it receives is text: the sentence, your vocabulary, your previous sentence in that field, and the names of the app and the field. No window title, no screenshot, no audio.
Your words
The Dictionary window holds the names and jargon you use. Words to expect steer the speech recognition itself, so a product name is heard right in the first place; fixes rewrite a word it keeps getting wrong, once, and for good. It is free, like everything else that runs on the Mac.
What stays in MacWhisper
Files, subtitles and meeting recordings. Keep MacWhisper for them if you use them, and let Deixis do the typing.
Before you ask
Questions people search for
Is Deixis a good MacWhisper alternative on a Mac?
For dictation, yes: it is what Deixis was built for. Hold Ctrl+Option, speak and release, and
tidy text lands at the cursor of any app, with speech recognised on your Mac, no account and no
licence to buy. For transcribing audio files, subtitles or meetings on a Mac, MacWhisper remains the
better tool.
Can Deixis transcribe a recording I already have?
No. Deixis turns what you say into text as you say it, and has no way to open an audio or video file from elsewhere. If files are a big part of your week, keep MacWhisper for them; the two run side by side on the same Mac.
Why does MacWhisper from the App Store not dictate into other apps?
MacWhisper's own docs say dictation into any text field is only in the version sold on its website, because of the restrictions Apple puts on apps sold through the Mac App Store. That version is called Whisper Transcription there. Deixis is a direct download, and dictating into any app is its main job.
Is Deixis free on a Mac?
Yes, for everything that runs on your Mac, with no account: dictation, free mode, screen grabs and annotation, screen recording, the history and the dictionary. Pro, at $49 a year or $10 a month, buys cloud cleanup with nothing to set up. With your own provider key, that is free too.
Does Deixis work offline on a Mac?
Yes. Once the speech model is downloaded, dictation, free mode, grabs and recordings all work with no network, and rules-based cleanup runs on the Mac. Your audio is never uploaded, under any setting or on any plan.
Can Deixis record meetings on a Mac, like MacWhisper?
Not yet. Deixis records and transcribes meetings on Windows and on Android today, but the Mac build does not have meeting mode. If you need meetings recorded on your Mac now, MacWhisper Pro does that.
Keep reading
Related pages
How to type by voice in any app on a Mac, with the speech recognised on the Mac itself
How to type by voice in any app on a Mac: hold Ctrl+Option, speak, let go. Speech recognition runs on your Mac, free and with no account.
Here is every byte that leaves your machine, for each tool
Every byte Deixis sends off your machine in one table, and the same table filled in for other dictation tools from their own documentation, dated.
Superwhisper or Deixis on your Mac: the models, the price and what leaves
Superwhisper puts its AI modes and every language model on Pro. Deixis tidies your dictation on your Mac for free, and never sends your window title.
Wispr Flow, or dictation your Mac keeps to itself
Wispr Flow transcribes in the cloud and, on a Mac, can send a screenshot with each dictation. Deixis dictates on your Mac itself, free, with no account.
VoiceInk or Deixis, two local dictation apps for your Mac
VoiceInk and Deixis both recognise speech on your Mac. VoiceInk is $25 and needs macOS 14.4; Deixis is free for everything local and runs on macOS 13.
Apple Dictation, and what Deixis adds on the same Mac
Apple Dictation is free and built into your Mac. Deixis adds tidier text on any Apple silicon Mac, your own words, and grabs and recording on one key.
Hold a key. Speak. Keep working.
Deixis is free, needs no account, and runs on your own device. Everything on this page is in the current release.
v1.2.2 · 64‑bit Windows 10/11 · macOS 13 on Apple silicon · 51 MB · nothing else to install · also for Windows
Facts about MacWhisper checked on 2026-09-27 against macwhisper.com. Deixis facts are from its README for the current release. Something out of date? Tell us.