# Dictator Offline Voice to Text — Talk to your device. No cloud.

> Talk to your device. No cloud. (iPhone/iPad app by Rob Gough.)

- Source: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/dictator-offline-voice-to-text/id6772823676 (this page in markdown: same URL + `.md`)
- Developer: [Rob Gough](https://appshunter.io/developer/6772823678)
- Category: Productivity, Utilities
- Price: Free
- Age rating: 4+
- Requires: iOS 26.0 · 6 MB
- Languages: American English
- Released: 2026-06-01
- Data updated: 2026-08-28
- User reviews in markdown: https://appshunter.io/ios/app/dictator-offline-voice-to-text/id6772823676/reviews.md

## What is Dictator Offline Voice to Text?

Dictator turns speech into text without sending audio anywhere.

Hold a button on the Dictator keyboard, talk, release — the result lands in
whichever app you were typing in. Transcription runs on-device using Parakeet,
a fast speech model that fits on Apple Silicon. Optional clean-up uses Apple
Intelligence to tidy filler words and add natural punctuation, also on-device.

— Two modes —

Dictate captures fresh speech and pastes it wherever you were typing.

Assist takes the text already in the field plus a spoken instruction and
transforms it: shorten, expand, translate, change tone, fix the grammar,
turn dot points into a paragraph. The original text returns with one tap of
undo.

— Privacy by design —

  • Audio never leaves your device. Inference is entirely local.
  • No account, no sign-in, no analytics.
  • The model is downloaded once from Hugging Face — that's the only
    network traffic Dictator initiates.
  • The keyboard extension communicates with the app via a private App Group
    on your device.

— Setup —

A four-step welcome guide gets you running: grant microphone access, download
the speech model (about 460 MB, one-time), install the Dictator keyboard,
enable Allow Full Access. Full Access is required so the keyboard can read
the text you're transforming and open the host app to record — both are
strictly on-device operations.

— Requirements —

  • iPhone with Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, or
    any iPhone 16)
  • iOS 26 or later
  • Around 600 MB of free space for the speech model

— Open source —

Dictator is open source. Source code at github.com/robgough/dictator.

Made by Rob Gough.


## Version history (last 3 releases)

### 2026.6.1 — 2026-06-25

Some slight UI tweaks, a new navigation bar... and the new Scratchpad for keeping longer notes!

### 2026.6.0 — 2026-06-05

Fixed the multilingual (Parakeet v3) model download failing at the end with "model layout looks incomplete" — tap Try again after updating to finish the download.

### 2026.5 — 2026-06-01

No release notes.

---

*Data collected daily from the US App Store and indexed by [AppsHunter](https://appshunter.io/). User reviews are verbatim App Store reviews. Ratings, prices and chart positions refresh continuously; this snapshot is from 2026-08-28.*