The best offline speech to text for Windows
Lven Instant is the best offline speech to text for Windows: the model runs on the PC, it works with no connection after setup, there is no word cap, it never rewrites your words, and it is the only app here with a published speed and accuracy measurement — about six times faster than realtime at a 3.76% word error rate on consumer-grade hardware. Whisperstream and SuperDictate are the one-time-purchase picks for a single machine; OpenWhispr if you want free and open source; Dragon if you need voice commands.
- Transcription runs on the PC, not on a server
- Works with the network off after setup
- What it does to your words
- Usage limits and price shape
- Published speed and accuracy
The only paid dictation product compared on this site that is always on-device, never rewrites your words, has no usage cap and ships on Linux — and after two months of membership the builds are yours to keep.
Right for: Daily dictation on a Windows PC, offline, with the same membership on Linux and Android.
On-device push-to-talk dictation for Windows only, as a one-time purchase. The cheapest way to dictate offline on a single Windows machine.
Right for: One Windows machine and the lowest one-time price.
On-device dictation for Mac and Windows as a one-time purchase. The simplest shape if one desktop is all you need.
Right for: One person, one Mac or Windows machine, a single payment.
Free, MIT-licensed Whisper dictation that runs offline, for people happy to manage models themselves. On the same hardware where Lven's engine runs six times faster than realtime, whisper-large-v3 never reaches it.
Right for: Free and open source above everything, and comfortable troubleshooting models and configs yourself.
The professional suite: deep voice commands, corrections by voice, medical and legal vocabularies, at professional prices and with a real learning curve.
Right for: Hands-free control of the whole computer, or a workplace that already standardises on Dragon.
Free, built in, and on most configurations it sends your audio to Microsoft's online speech service. Fine for an occasional sentence.
Right for: Occasional dictation with zero setup and zero cost, when cloud processing is not a concern.
Common questions.
Does Windows have built-in offline speech to text?
Does offline speech to text need a GPU?
Is anything sent to a server at all?
- Wispr Flow pricing page — Pro $15/user/mo monthly or $12/user/mo billed annually; free tier 2,000 words/week on desktop
- Digital Trends — Wispr Flow traces accuracy complaints to an over-aggressive Auto Cleanup that changed words
- Typeless — home page and pricing page: Mac, Windows, iOS and Android; polished-writing rewrite; free tier 8,000 words/week; $12/member/mo billed yearly, $30 monthly
- Superwhisper — AI voice to text for macOS, Windows and iOS; offline and cloud models
- ClassEve — server vs on-device dictation engines, measurement on consumer-grade hardware (RTF, WER, latency)
- ClassEve — What the polish pass changes: the 31-case golden corpus