Software · Dictation for macOS
Parla
Dictation that never leaves your Mac. Hold a key anywhere in macOS, speak, and the text appears in whatever app you are already using.
Hold a key anywhere in macOS, speak, and the text appears in whatever app you are already using. The recognition, the cleanup and the transcript all happen on the machine in front of you. Nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to.
Press and hold Right Command in any application. A small panel appears without stealing focus from what you were typing into.
Your microphone feeds a speech model running on silicon you already own. There is no third leg to the journey.
Patient names, client matters, unreleased figures — the sentence never leaves the room.
The speech model sits on your disk from the first launch onward. Offline is not a degraded mode here; it is the only mode.
What comes out is what you meant
Filler goes, punctuation and capitalisation are fixed, repeated words are dropped, and the names on your list are spelled the way you spell them.
um so I was thinking that we should uh probably move the the meeting to tuesday because like john is out on monday
So I was thinking that we should probably move the meeting to Tuesday because John is out on Monday.
Cleanup runs on the language model already inside macOS, and its version is discarded if it arrives late, drifts too far from what you said, or drops a name you registered.
The honest ledger of what leaves your machine
Every dictation tool describes itself as secure. The more useful question is which bytes actually cross the network.
Stays on your Mac
- Your voice. Captured, transcribed, discarded — no recording is written to disk.
- Every transcript. Recognition happens locally, on the Neural Engine.
- The cleanup pass, handled by the language model built into macOS, in the same way.
- Your vocabulary. Colleagues, clients and product names never travel.
- Your history. Text only, on your disk, readable only by you, simple to switch off.
Crosses the network
- The speech model. Once. About 640 MB on first launch, from the model repository.
- After that, nothing. No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reports, no licence checks.
That download could have been left out of the pitch. It is the only network moment there is, and a privacy claim you cannot audit is worth nothing — so it belongs on the page.
Nothing to intercept, subpoena or leak
Cloud dictation means your speech is transmitted to a vendor, processed on their hardware and retained under their policy. Parla removes that party from the diagram entirely: there is no processor to add to your data map and no retention schedule to read. And there is no sign-in, no password, no session token and no synced profile — a breach at a vendor cannot expose what the vendor was never given.
Three steps, and you never leave the app you are in
- Hold and speak. Press and hold Right Command — or whichever key you prefer — in any application.
- Release. The recogniser finishes, filler words go, punctuation and capitalisation are fixed, and your own names are spelled the way you spell them.
- It is already typed. The text lands at your cursor — Mail, Slack, Notes, an editor, a form field. Your clipboard is restored exactly as you left it.
Measured on an actual machine
Recorded on an Apple M4. Not projections, and not a benchmark chosen to flatter.
- 12–17× faster than real time, transcribing while you speak.
- 0.67 s to clean up a dictated sentence.
- 4.2 s to correct a 110-word email and break it into paragraphs.
- 40 language locales, with automatic detection between them.
- 0 bytes of audio transmitted, at any point, ever.
No meter, because there is no server to pay for
Cloud transcription costs its vendor real money for every minute you speak, which is why it is sold by subscription or by the minute. Local processing costs nothing per use, so there is nothing to meter. The Neural Engine in every Apple silicon Mac is capacity you have already bought, and the models carry no per-seat fee.