Bellow vs Apple Dictation

macOS already has dictation, and it's free. Here's an honest account of when that's all you need - and the specific gaps that make people look for something else.

Written by the Bellow team

Start here: Apple Dictation is good and it's free

If built-in dictation covers your needs, use it. It costs nothing, it's already installed, and on Apple Silicon much of it runs on-device. We'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

People come looking for an alternative for a few consistent reasons.

1. Accuracy on hard input

Whisper Large-v3 Turbo tends to hold up better on accented speech, technical vocabulary, proper nouns, and fast talking. If Apple's dictation transcribes you well, this difference won't matter much. If you keep correcting the same words, it matters a lot.

2. Push-to-talk instead of a session

Built-in dictation is modal - you start it, it listens, it can stop on its own. Bellow is press-and-hold: hold your key, talk, release, and the text pastes. Nothing to end, nothing that times out mid-thought. For short bursts all day, the difference in feel is larger than it sounds.

3. Long-form dictation

Speak for as long as you like. There's no session limit and no cutoff - useful for drafting an email or a paragraph of notes in one go.

4. A record of what you dictated

Bellow keeps local history, encrypted with AES-GCM using a key stored in your Mac's Keychain that never syncs to iCloud. You can search it, export it, or wipe it. There's also a mode that writes nothing to disk at all.

So which one?

• Stick with Apple Dictation if it transcribes you accurately, you dictate occasionally, and sessions aren't getting in your way. Free is a great price.
• Try Bellow if you're fixing the same errors repeatedly, you dictate long passages, you want a searchable local record, or you need to demonstrate that audio never left the machine.