Dictate in ten languages, none of which leave your Mac
English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Cantonese. Same hold-to-talk, same cursor, same nothing-uploaded.
This needs macOS 26. On macOS 14 and 15, Aly dictates in English only — the table below says why.
Multilingual usually means multi-uploaded
Dictation apps advertise long language lists because a server can hold every model at once. Yours is not the machine doing the work — which is fine right up until the language you speak at home is also the language you would rather not stream to a company you have never heard of.
Aly downloads the speech model for the language you pick and runs it on your Mac. The audio does not travel, in any language.
The languages
- English
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Italian
- Portuguese
- Japanese
- Korean
- Chinese
- Cantonese
Around thirty regional variants across those ten — and Aly does not decide the list. It asks macOS what this particular Mac can transcribe and shows you that, so the picker never offers a language your machine cannot actually do.
What your macOS version changes
| Your Mac | Dictation languages |
|---|---|
| macOS 26 or later | All ten languages, about thirty regional variants |
| macOS 14 and 15 | English only — the fallback model does not switch language |
macOS 26 introduced the on-device speech engine Aly uses for languages other than English. Older versions get a smaller model that ships inside the app, works offline, and only speaks English. If you are not on 26 yet, buy Aly for the English dictation or wait — not for this page.
Switching, and the limit worth knowing about
Pick a language in Settings and Aly downloads that model once. macOS lets one app keep five languages ready at a time, so when you reach for a sixth, Aly retires the one you have not used in longest — never the one you are dictating in. Going back to it downloads it again. Nothing breaks; it is just a wait you did not have the first time.
Aly's own interface, too
Settings, onboarding and the menu bar follow your system language in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, as well as English. There is no picker inside Aly — macOS already owns that setting, and a second one is just somewhere for the two to disagree.
Being straight about it: those translations are machine-made and have not yet been read by a native speaker. They have been checked by machine for the errors that matter most — mangled placeholders, wrong script, inconsistent terminology — but if something reads oddly in your language, it is our translation and not your understanding. Tell us and we will fix it.
Try it in your language
Seven days free with just your email. Long enough to find out whether it hears you properly.
See pricing