Saidso: Private, local dictation for Mac

See it in action

Speak, and it shows you it's listening, then types.

A quiet pill by the notch tracks your voice while you talk. Release, and clean text lands wherever your cursor is. For anything longer than a sentence there is hands free: press once to start, keep talking with no key held down, press again to stop. Text arrives in pieces as you go, at natural pauses, instead of all at once at the end.

The pill. Live on-screen feedback as you speak: listening, transcribing, then thinking. Release, and clean text lands where your cursor is.

Saidso menu-bar dropdown showing model, mode, language, and microphone at a glance — **One click away.** Model, mode, language, and mic at a glance.

Saidso Settings on the Models section, with local Whisper models and on-device AI enhancement — **Everything local.** Whisper models and on-device AI, no keys.

Pricing

One-time purchase. No subscription.

Try free for 30 days. The trial starts on first launch, no email required. Buy a license when you're ready.

Solo

€19

1 Mac

Buy Solo

Personal

€29

2 Macs

Buy Personal

Extended

€39

3 Macs

Buy Extended

One-time purchase. Pick a tier above. Checkout takes a minute, then copy your license key from your Polar receipt (it's on your purchases page, linked from your confirmation email) and paste it into the app. Prefer to try first? Start the free 30-day trial below, no signup. Seats move between your own devices.

Download free trial 30 days · no signup

macOS today. Saidso runs on macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon). More platforms are in the works; no release date to share yet.

How Saidso compares

The only one that's both one-time and fully local.

Others are cheaper up front but rent-forever, or private only until the AI step reaches for the cloud.

	Saidso	VoiceInk	Wispr Flow	superwhisper
Price	€19–€39 once	$25–$49 once	$15/mo	$8.49/moor $249.99 once
Business model	One-time	One-time	Subscriptionfree tier	Subscriptionor lifetime
Transcription	On-device	On-device	Cloud only	On-device
AI enhancement	Local · no key	Cloud · your key	Cloud · built-in	Cloud · your key
Works Wi-Fi off	Fully	Transcribe only	No	Transcribe only
Needs an account	No	No	Yes	No

Competitor details last checked July 2026 against each vendor's own site; these are capable apps and their pricing and feature sets may change.

Questions

FAQ & system requirements

What do I need to run it?

macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later on an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer). The one-time model download aside, everything runs on your machine.

Does anything leave my device?

Your dictation never does. Transcription and enhancement run locally. The only network access is the optional model download, checking for app updates, and activating or deactivating your license. See the privacy notice for exactly what's sent and to whom.

Do I have to hold a key down the whole time?

No. Hold the key for a quick sentence. For anything longer, press your hands free key once and talk with nothing held down, then press it again to stop. The text arrives in pieces as you speak, at natural pauses, instead of all at once at the end.

Two things worth knowing. If you have turned on "copy to clipboard only", or your trial has ended, a hands free session does not paste as it goes. It puts the whole transcript on your clipboard when you stop. And the AI enhancement pass does not run during a hands free session, so that text is spell corrected and dictionary corrected, but not polished by the local model.

How does the trial work?

Download and launch. A 30-day trial starts automatically. No sign-up, no email, no credit card. Full features throughout the trial.

What happens when the trial ends?

Dictation keeps working to your clipboard; AI enhancement and auto-paste pause until you activate a license. Your settings are preserved.

What are the license terms?

One-time purchase. Each tier covers a number of devices (1 / 2 / 3); you can deactivate one to free a seat and move it to another.

Do I need to bring an API key?

No. Unlike cloud-enhanced tools, Saidso's AI enhancement runs on a local model. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to paste.

Is there a Windows or mobile version?

Not yet. Saidso runs on macOS 14+ (Apple Silicon) today. More platforms are in the works, but there's no release date to share yet, so buy it for the Mac you have now.

Transparency

Privacy notice

Your audio and dictated text never leave your device, and no dictation content is transmitted in anything below. The app itself connects to the internet for three purposes only, and those are the first three items. The rest of the list is not the app: it covers what stays on your machine, links that open in your browser, and this website and its download email.

License activation and deactivation. When you activate or deactivate a license, Saidso sends your license key and a hashed device identifier to our licensing service (Cloudflare Workers) and to Polar, our payment and licensing provider (merchant of record), to verify and manage your seats. Cloudflare processes your IP address transiently for rate limiting and does not log it.
App update checks. Saidso checks GitHub for new releases so you can stay up to date. These requests expose your IP address and app/OS version to GitHub, who hosts our releases. Automatic checks ask your permission first.
Optional model download. If you choose to download a speech model, Saidso fetches that file from Hugging Face, who host it. If you choose to download an AI enhancement model, Saidso asks the copy of Ollama on your own machine to fetch it, and Ollama downloads it. Both are optional and both are started by you.
What never leaves your machine. Transcription runs against a speech engine bundled inside the app, and AI enhancement runs against Ollama on your own computer. Saidso reaches both at 127.0.0.1, the loopback address, which is your Mac talking to itself and never touches the network. Turn Wi-Fi off and dictation still works. That is the whole point of the design, and it is why this list is as short as it is.
Links you click. Buttons such as Website, Release Notes, User Guide and Ollama open your browser at that address. That is your browser connecting, not Saidso, and only when you click.
This website. No cookies, no analytics service, no tracking scripts. We keep daily counts of visits, downloads and checkout clicks, broken down by which link brought you here, your country and your operating system. That is all. No IP addresses, no city, no browser fingerprint, nothing stored on your device and nothing that identifies you or can be traced back to you.
Email me the download. If you are on a phone and ask us to email you the Mac download link, your address is used once, to send that one email, and is never written to any database of ours. We keep no list, we will never email you again, and there is nothing to unsubscribe from. The message is handed to Resend, the service that delivers it for us, and they process your address only to deliver that one message. If you tell us which platform you would mainly use, that answer is added to an anonymous daily count and is never stored beside your address. To stop the form being abused we keep a salted, daily rotating hash of the sending IP address for two days. That hash is not an IP address, it cannot be turned back into one, and it is linked neither to your email address nor to the counts above.

Recipients: Polar (payments & licensing), Cloudflare (licensing and website infrastructure), Resend (delivery of the download-link email), Fastmail (our support mailbox), GitHub (release hosting & updates), and, only if you choose to download a model, Hugging Face (speech models) and Ollama (AI enhancement models). Saidso is made in Sweden. Questions about your data? Email [email protected].

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