Dictating with nothing leaving your machine

In offline mode, transcription happens on your own computer. There is no network call: not the audio, not the text, not an acknowledgement. That is the only reason a lawyer or a doctor would install this product, so the promise admits no exception.

The mode is switched on in the settings, Offline dictation tab, once you have downloaded a model. There are two, and they serve different needs:

• Fast, around 181 MB. It answers in a second and a half on just about any machine, and gets proper nouns wrong more often.
• Faithful, around 574 MB. Close to cloud quality, but several seconds of work, more on an ordinary laptop.

What you lose, and you should know before switching it on: the styles that rewrite, which are Message, Email and Notes. They need a remote language model, and calling one would undo exactly what offline mode was chosen for. Standard and Raw remain.

What remains is not thin: the engine punctuates, accents and capitalises on its own, and your vocabulary, the proper-noun correction, French typography and your text shortcuts are applied afterwards, with no model and no network.

Offline mode is available on Windows, on the paid plans. On Mac the engine is not shipped yet, and the settings say so rather than letting you try.