Search what you said
Every dictation is filed and indexed. Find the thing you muttered walking to the car in March.
Dictation for macOS
Free dictation for Mac. No word limit, ever.
Press ⌥ Space anywhere on your Mac and talk. The words are typed where your cursor already was — recognition runs on your machine, so nothing is uploaded, nothing is metered, and there is no weekly cap to run out of.
And unlike every other dictation app, the words do not disappear the moment they land. They are kept, searchable, and readable by the agents you already use.
Free, uncapped, no account needed to dictate. The workspace is the plan.
Press ⌥ Space anywhere on your Mac
A demo, not a recording — your microphone is not being used on this page.
How it works
You press a key. The workspace does the rest.
Three steps, and you only do the first one. Nothing here asks you to file, tag or name anything — the workspace is what turns a sentence you said into something you can find.
- 01
Press ⌥ Space
Anywhere on your Mac. There is no window to find and nothing to put in front of what you were doing.
- 02
Talk
The recognition runs on your machine, so the audio never leaves it and there is no weekly word limit — there is nothing for us to meter.
- 03
It lands in your workspace
The words are typed where your cursor already was — macOS asks for Accessibility once, and after that it just happens. The same sentence arrives in your workspace with its own key, filed against the work it belongs to, so you can find it months later without having filed anything.
Why it can be free
Because it costs us nothing to run.
The recognition happens on your Mac, not on our servers. There is no per-word bill for us to pass on, so there is no cap to enforce. The cloud dictation apps limit their free tiers because every word you speak costs them money — that is a structural difference, not a pricing decision.
Local utilitiesWispr FlowClearly
On-deviceYesNo — cloudYes
Inserts at your cursorYesYesYes
Free tierTrial only~2,000 words a weekUncapped, permanently
The words are keptNoNoYes — searchable
Something can act on themNoNoYes
Price$25–249 once$15 a monthFree · workspace is the plan
Competitor positions as published by them, checked 18 August 2026. Local utilities: Superwhisper, MacWhisper, VoiceInk, Voibe.
Print 06 · shell · ink
still going.still going.still going.
Everyone else meters you because every word you speak costs them money. Nothing you say costs us anything, so there is no weekly limit to run out of — this month, next year, on the free plan.
The cast
Nib is one of eleven.
The character in the corner of your screen is not a logo with a face on it — each one has a job in Beehaven that carries on whether or not you are watching. Two are yours the moment you install; the rest are earned with nectar you gather by using the app. None of them costs money.
NibFree
draws the world
TuckFree
carries the world
Smudge
sits on the world
Blot
brings the world back
Patch
fills the world in
Dab
catches the world
Wash
remembers the world
Quill
stays where it is
Barb
keeps everyone off it
Hatch
watches it happen
Spool
hangs from the line
What you keep
Every other dictation app throws the words away.
Speech in, text at the cursor, gone. Nothing to search, nothing to come back to, nothing for an agent to read. Clearly keeps all of it — in a real workspace with documents, projects, a board and a canvas.
It files itself
Talk about the Harbour job and it lands on the Harbour job — with the decision kept, and the one it replaces struck through.
An agent can act on it
Leave it a message on a walk. It reads it next time it signs in, does the work, and every change it makes is signed.
The workspace
Where the words end up.
Everything you dictate lands in something built to hold it — and the same workspace is open to every agent you already use.
Documents
Every version is recoverable, every comment stays anchored to the passage it was about, and a link between two documents keeps pointing at the right one after a rename.
Projects
Folders that hold the real things — documents, files, boards, canvases. Talk about the Harbour job and it files itself there.
Boards
Work you can see. Every ticket gets a short key you can say out loud — S1-14 — and quote back a month later.
Canvas
A surface instead of a page: cards, drawings and live pages you can move around. An agent can put things on it while you watch.
Thought map
One map per workspace of what has actually been settled, searchable by meaning rather than by the words you happened to use.
Your agents
Claude Code, the desktop app, Cursor, ChatGPT — the same workspace over MCP, with every change one makes signed and logged.
Print 05 · ink · wing
the line was there the whole time
Every word you have said, still here.Pricing
The dictation is free. The memory is the plan.
You never pay to talk. You pay when you want everything you have said to be somewhere, searchable, and reachable by an agent.
Free
Unlimited dictation, on your machine, forever.
- · No weekly word cap
- · Nothing leaves your Mac
- · Local history you can search
Workspace
When you want the words to outlive the sentence.
- · Everything filed and searchable across devices
- · Documents, projects, boards, canvas
- · Agents over MCP — Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT
Questions
The ones people actually ask.
Every answer here is a fact about the shipped app, checked at the source rather than written from the marketing copy.
Is Clearly dictation really free, with no word limit?
Yes. Speech recognition runs on your own Mac, so there is no per-word bill for us to pass on and no cap to enforce. Cloud dictation apps limit their free tiers — Wispr Flow at roughly 2,000 words a week — because every word you speak costs them money. That is a structural difference, not a pricing decision. Clearly charges for the workspace the words land in, never for talking.
Does my audio leave my computer?
No. Recognition happens on your machine. There is nothing for us to meter, which is the same reason there is no weekly limit.
Do the words appear where I am already typing?
Yes. Press ⌥Space anywhere on macOS, talk, and the text is inserted into the field your cursor was already in — no window to find and nothing put in front of what you were doing. macOS asks for Accessibility permission the first time, and after that it just happens.
Is this dictation, speech to text, or voice typing?
All three names describe the same thing, and different apps pick different ones — Apple calls the built-in macOS feature Dictation, some tools say voice to text, Windows says voice typing. Clearly does that job: you speak and text appears in whatever you were typing in, in real time. It is not audio-file transcription — if you have a recording of a meeting or an interview and want a transcript of it afterwards, that is a different kind of tool.
How is this different from the dictation already built into macOS?
Apple’s is free, on-device and fine for a sentence at a time. The difference is not accuracy — it is what happens after. Apple’s dictation drops the words into the field and forgets them; Clearly keeps the same sentence in a workspace where it is filed, searchable months later, and readable by the agents you already use. If you only ever want a sentence typed, the built-in one is genuinely enough.
How is this different from Superwhisper, MacWhisper or Wispr Flow?
Every one of those is a transcription utility: speech in, text at the cursor, gone. On-device recognition is the whole category’s baseline and accuracy is commoditised. Clearly is the only one with a workspace behind the microphone — the same sentence also arrives filed, searchable, and readable by an agent months later.
What happens to everything I dictate?
It lands in your workspace with its own key, filed against the work it belongs to, without you tagging or naming anything. You can search it, link it, and let an agent act on it over MCP — Claude Code, Cursor, the desktop app or ChatGPT all reach the same workspace.
What is the character on screen?
The avatar is the dictation overlay: it shows you when it is listening, when it is transcribing, and where the words went. Nib is one of the cast that ships with the app; several are free the moment you install and the rest are earned by using it. None of them costs money.