Mac dictation without a subscription
Dictation software has quietly become a monthly bill. It does not have to be.
Why almost everything charges monthly
It is not greed, it is architecture. If an app sends your voice to a server to be transcribed, every sentence you dictate costs the vendor money. A one-off payment cannot cover a cost that never stops, so the price has to recur — and your audio has to leave your machine for the model to hear it.
Running the model on your Mac inverts both halves. The transcription costs nothing per sentence because your own hardware does the work, which makes a one-time price possible. And your voice has no reason to leave the machine, because nothing remote needs to hear it.
That is the whole reason Aly can be $29 once. The privacy and the price are the same decision seen from two sides.
What you get for $29
- Transcription and tone rephrasing both run on your Mac
- Works with no internet at all, once the model is downloaded
- No transcript ever reaches us — the only history is on your own Mac
- Recognises over a hundred apps and sites, and shapes the text to suit
- Learns the names and jargon you correct
- $29 once, and it keeps working forever
What you give up
A model that runs on your Mac has to fit on your Mac. The largest cloud speech models are bigger than anything that will run locally, and on hard audio — heavy accents, background noise, technical jargon — they can still be more accurate. Aly offers three model sizes so you can trade speed for accuracy, but it does not pretend to beat a datacentre at its own game.
Aly also needs Apple silicon, and a one-off download for the speech model before it can work offline.
If your work depends on the last percentage point of accuracy on difficult audio, a cloud service may genuinely suit you better. If it depends on your words staying on your machine, or on not paying rent for your own voice, that is what Aly is for.
Seven days, no card
Your email starts the trial, and there is nothing to cancel. If it does not fit how you work, you have lost nothing.