Free Live Dictation

Dragon Professional is a well-known desktop dictation program that typically costs around 200 dollars as a one-time purchase and installs locally on Windows. Otter and similar cloud services offer live transcription but run on their servers, usually behind a monthly subscription and with your audio leaving your device. This tool is free, needs no install beyond a web page, and keeps everything on-device like Dragon while costing nothing like the free tiers of cloud tools. The tradeoff is that a browser running Whisper on your CPU is slower and slightly less tuned than dedicated commercial engines, so treat this as a strong free alternative rather than a drop-in replacement for professional broadcast dictation.

Whisper Tiny (~45MB) is the fastest and works on any device, but is the least accurate, which suits quick notes on a phone. Whisper Base (~80MB) is a good balance of speed and accuracy and is a sensible default for most dictation. Whisper Small (~250MB) is the most accurate but uses more memory and lags more between speaking and seeing text. Start with Tiny or Base for smooth live typing, and move up to Small only if you have a fast machine and need higher accuracy.

The tool transcribes short rolling chunks of audio and re-runs Whisper over the recent recording each time a new chunk arrives. Whisper uses surrounding context to decide the most likely words, so when more speech arrives it can revise an earlier guess, which you see as the text adjusting slightly before it settles. This is normal for streaming speech recognition and it usually converges to accurate text within a second or two. If you want the most stable result, pause briefly at natural sentence breaks so each segment has full context.

Yes. The transcript lives in a normal editable text area, so you can click into it and fix words, punctuation, or spacing at any time. This is useful for correcting names, numbers, and homophones that speech recognition commonly gets wrong. Because live updates append or refine text, it is often easiest to dictate a stretch, click Stop, and then do your edits, but nothing prevents you from typing while recording. When you are done, use Copy or Download .txt to keep the finished note.

No installation is needed. It is a pure web tool that runs in any modern browser with microphone support. The only thing that downloads is the Whisper model itself, which Transformers.js fetches on first use and caches in your browser. There is no extension, no desktop app, and no Python or Node environment to set up. You do need to grant microphone permission the first time so the tool can hear you.

If you block the microphone, the tool cannot hear you and it shows a clear red error box explaining that access was denied. To fix it, open your browser site permissions, usually via the padlock icon in the address bar, and allow the microphone for this page, then reload and try again. No audio is captured until you both grant permission and click Start. On shared or public machines, remember to revoke the permission afterward if you prefer.

Whisper is multilingual and this tool exposes dozens of languages plus an automatic detection option. You can let Whisper detect the language from your speech or set it manually for more reliable results, which helps when you switch between accents or speak a less common language. Accuracy is strongest for widely spoken languages that appear heavily in Whisper training data, such as English, Spanish, French, German, and Mandarin. Less common languages still work but may need more editing.

Once the model has been downloaded and cached, dictation runs without an internet connection because everything happens on-device. It also works on mobile browsers that support WebAssembly and microphone access, though phones are slower than a laptop, so the Tiny or Base model is the better choice on mobile. For the smoothest experience, load the model once over Wi-Fi before you rely on it offline. Keep the tab open and in the foreground while dictating so the browser does not throttle the recorder.

It is designed for exactly that: your audio and the resulting text never leave your browser, so there is no cloud copy to leak. This makes it a reasonable fit for medical, legal, or personal notes that must not be sent to a third-party service. That said, the transcript sits in your browser tab and, if you download it, on your local disk, so treat those files with normal care and clear the note when you are finished. You can independently verify the no-upload behavior in your browser DevTools Network tab.

On the very first use the browser downloads the Whisper model files from the Hugging Face CDN, which can take 30 to 60 seconds depending on the model size and your connection. After that, the files are stored in your browser cache, so future sessions load the model almost instantly and can even run offline. That same cache is shared with the speech-to-text and subtitle-generator tools on this site, so if you have already used one of those with the same model, dictation starts immediately. Clearing your browser cache removes the model and triggers a fresh download next time.