What is dictation software — and how do you choose it?
Dictation software converts your speech into text and types it into whatever application you're using — documents, chat, email, code. The differences that actually matter when choosing: where the audio is processed (cloud vs on your device), what the software does to your words afterwards (a deterministic clean-up or a generative rewrite), whether usage is limited or metered, which platforms are covered, and whether you pay once, monthly, or eventually own it.
The five questions that decide the choice
One: where does the audio go? Cloud dictation uploads your voice for processing; on-device dictation runs the model on your own hardware, so audio never leaves. Two: what happens to your words after recognition — a deterministic clean-up, or a generative rewrite? Three: are there limits — daily caps, per-minute metering? Four: does it cover the platforms you actually use, or just one? Five: what's the pricing shape — free built-in, one-time purchase, subscription — and do you own anything when you stop paying?
Accuracy, the spec everyone asks about first, has largely converged for everyday dictation on modern engines — the questions above now separate products more than raw accuracy does.
Deterministic clean-up vs generative rewrite
Every dictation product does something to the raw transcript before typing it. There are two families. A deterministic clean-up applies fixed rules — remove stutters, fillers and repeated words; restore contractions and proper nouns; case sentences; punctuate — with no language model involved. The same audio yields the same text every time, and every word that survives is a word you said. A generative rewrite runs the transcript through a language model that infers what you meant and how it should read: it can restructure a list, drop hedging, and match tone to the app you are in. The output reads smoother; it is also, by design, allowed to differ from what you said.
Neither is wrong. They optimise for different things. If you dictate finished prose and want it to arrive finished, a rewrite layer is doing you a favour. If you dictate for a living — messages, notes, code comments, anything where the exact words carry the meaning — a rewrite is one more thing to re-read for meaning on every sentence, and a deterministic pass is one less. In July 2026 one cloud dictation vendor traced accuracy complaints to its rewrite default having changed words users had not asked it to touch, which is the failure mode of the generative family in one sentence.
ClassEve's Lven Instant and Lven Cloud both use a deterministic pass and no rewrite. The rule list and the 31-case corpus that every platform's implementation is tested against are published under Research, so what the pass does and does not touch is checkable rather than asserted.
The landscape
Built-in options (Windows voice typing, phone keyboards) are free and fine for casual use, generally cloud-processed. Professional suites like Dragon add deep voice-command control at professional prices. A newer generation — including ClassEve's Lven Instant — runs transcription entirely on-device: private by architecture, unlimited by design, and working offline. Our comparisons page puts these side by side, including the cases where the free option is the right answer.