Best Dictation Apps for iPhone and Android

Start with the keyboard you already have. On iPhone, Apple's built-in Dictation runs on the phone in many languages and needs no internet connection ¹. Google moved Gboard's speech recognition onto the phone in 2019, first on Pixel phones in American English ². A separate app earns its place in four cases: dictating for more than a few minutes at a time, cleaning up spoken text with AI, handling names and terms the keyboard gets wrong, or keeping audio off a company's servers. This guide compares the main options by where they process audio, how they insert text, what they cost and which languages they cover. It uses only figures we checked against the source, with dates.

The built-in keyboards are free and good enough for messages

For short messages, email replies and notes, the built-in keyboards are the right first choice. You do not need to install anything, and the results are usable without much editing. The limits are clear enough to plan around.

On iPhone, turn on Dictation in the Settings app, under General, then Keyboard, by turning on Enable Dictation ³. Apple's current guide for iOS 27 says that Dictation on iPhone is processed on the device in many languages ¹. With Apple Intelligence in iOS 27, Dictation uses an on-device model that improves spelling, punctuation and capitalization, but only in English and on the iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air or later ⁴. Other iPhones and languages still dictate, without that cleanup.

One limit matters for longer work. Dictation on iPhone stops by itself after 30 seconds without speech ⁵, so a long pause ends the session.

On Android, Gboard shows a microphone at the top of the keyboard. You tap a text field, tap the microphone and speak when the phone shows "Speak now" ⁶. The first time Gboard uses the microphone, Android asks for a recording permission with three choices: While using app, Only this time or Don't allow ⁷. Choose While using app if you dictate often and do not want to be asked each time.

Apps beat the keyboard for long dictation, AI cleanup and privacy

A dictation app is worth comparing when the job is long, the text needs polishing, or the words are specialist. The clearest reason is speed on long text. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English text entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against 52 words per minute on the built-in keyboard ^{8 9}. At those rates, 1,000 words take about 6.5 minutes to speak ¹⁰ and about 19.2 minutes to type ¹¹, a saving of about 12.7 minutes ¹².

Those numbers have limits. The study used short phrases, read rather than composed, in a quiet room, and it counts the finished text including corrections ⁸. Real drafting also includes editing afterwards, so treat 153 words per minute ⁸ as a ceiling, not a typical day.

Accuracy is the second reason to compare apps. In a 2025 test, a 9to5Mac author ran one 7-minute-31-second episode through Apple's speech API and got a word error rate of 10.3 percent ¹³. Whisper Large V3 Turbo had 1.5 percent on the same episode ¹⁴, and NVIDIA's Parakeet v2 had 12.3 percent ¹⁵. These tests ran on a Mac, not an iPhone, so read them as evidence about the engines, not as an iPhone score.

Word error rate counts wrong words against a correct transcript, so one short test cannot rank apps for your voice. Use the test in the last section on your own text.

Apps also differ in how much they change your words. Some insert the recognizer's output as it is, with filler words such as "um" left in. Others pass the text through an AI model that fixes punctuation, removes false starts and rewrites phrasing. Cleanup saves editing time, but it can change words you meant to keep. If you write for work, read the output before you send it, and turn cleanup off when you need your exact wording.

Apps also differ in their limits. Wispr Flow's pricing page gives its free plan 2,000 dictated words per week on desktop and 1,000 per week on mobile ¹⁶. Its help page describes the iOS app differently: dictation keeps going but slows at 1,000 words in the weekly window, and a card blocks new dictations at 1,500 words per week ¹⁷. The two pages describe the 1,000-word point differently, so check the current plan before a long writing week.

For privacy, the question is where recognition runs. Apple says transcription with its newer developer speech API, SpeechAnalyzer, is entirely on the device once its language models are downloaded ¹⁸. Apple did not say in that session which engine the Dictation key uses. An app that sends audio to its own servers is a different case, and its privacy policy is the document to read.

On iPhone, dictation apps have to work around keyboard limits

On iPhone, a third-party keyboard runs in a sandbox. Apple's developer documentation says its default configuration disallows access to the network and prevents writing to the containing app's shared group containers ¹⁹. A keyboard that needs the network, for example to send text to a cloud model, has to ask for open access, and the user must turn on Allow Full Access for that keyboard in Settings ²⁰.

That switch carries a real cost. Apple's warning on third-party keyboards, as TechCrunch quoted it in 2014, says that if you enable Full Access, developers are permitted to access, collect and transmit the data you type ²¹. A keyboard that works fully on the phone, with no network request, does not need that permission. Read the keyboard's privacy policy before you turn it on. For more, see the glossary entries on third-party keyboards and Allow Full Access.

Apple's own Dictation key is not a third-party keyboard, so the Full Access switch does not apply to it. Apple's voice commands cover punctuation, line breaks and spelling. The full set is in our guide to iPhone dictation commands.

On Android, a voice keyboard can replace Gboard entirely

Gboard is the baseline for Android, and it is a keyboard you can use in any app. A voice keyboard can take that role if it offers the same microphone key. Before you switch, check three things: whether it works in the apps you use every day, whether it needs the network, and what permissions it asks for. Test it in your messaging app and your email app, because a keyboard that works in a notes app can behave differently in a form field or a chat window. A voice keyboard also asks for microphone permission, so check which recording choice it offers. For the setup steps on the built-in tool, see voice typing on Android and the glossary entries for Gboard and Google voice typing.

Gboard's own offline recognizer is the reason a keyboard can be useful without a connection. Google's 2019 recognizer was 80 MB after compression and worked when the phone was offline ². For how offline use is set up and what it covers, see offline voice typing on iPhone and Android.

Live Transcribe is a different tool. Google announced in March 2022 that Live Transcribe would work without an active internet connection after an additional download ²². It shows what people say on screen. It is not a keyboard, so it helps with conversations and lectures more than with email. See live transcription and voice control on phones and the glossary entry for Live Transcribe.

Whisper-based apps run accurate models on the phone itself

OpenAI's Whisper is an open speech recognition model, and whisper.cpp is an open source port of it in C and C++. The whisper.cpp project lists CPU-only inference among its features ²³, so the model does not need a graphics card or a server to run. That makes an on-phone Whisper app possible in principle, but whether a given app runs its audio on the phone is a question for that app's privacy policy.

Whisper's accuracy depends on the test. For its Large V2 model, the Whisper paper reports a word error rate of 2.7 percent on the LibriSpeech clean test set ²⁴, 13.8 percent on Switchboard, a telephone speech test ²⁵, and 25.5 percent on CHiME6 ²⁶. None of those tests is your phone, so measure your own voice before you rely on a Whisper app.

Whisper also has a known failure. A 2024 study of OpenAI's 2023 Whisper service found that roughly 1 percent of its audio transcriptions contained entire hallucinated phrases or sentences that did not exist in the audio ²⁷. The study used one dataset, recordings from speakers with and without aphasia, so the rate may differ for your audio. For notes, that is a reason to read the result before you send it. For a practical answer on Whisper keyboards for each phone, see whether you can use Whisper AI as a keyboard.

Compare apps by where audio is processed, price and languages

The table compares the options by the three things that differ most. Prices change often, so check the store listing before you buy. Where a row has no cited figure, we have left it out rather than guess.

Dragon on phones needs a check before you pay. A US reseller describes Dragon Professional Anywhere, a Nuance product, as cloud-hosted speech recognition for the enterprise ²⁹. We could not confirm the current status of a Dragon app for iPhone or Android from Nuance, Apple or Google. A forum thread in MacPowerUsers Talk from July 2026 reports that new Dragon Anywhere subscriptions could not be bought in the iOS app ³⁰, and a later reply guesses that the app is being pulled from both app stores. That thread is not an official notice, so check the store listing first. For more on Dragon and phones, see Dragon dictation for iPhone and Android.

The table is a starting point, not a verdict. Apple Dictation and Gboard cover most messages, and the other rows matter only when one of the four cases in the introduction applies to you.

Three rules for choosing:

• Long dictation. Choose an app that does not stop after a short silence, or dictate in shorter sessions with the built-in key.
• Private drafts. Choose an app whose recognition runs on the phone, and confirm that in its privacy policy.
• Specialist words. Choose an app that lets you add a custom word list, and test the names you use most.

For a free starting point, see the best free dictation app for iPhone and the best free voice to text app for Android. For how the keyboard side works, read how dictation keyboards work on iPhone and Android.

Language coverage varies, so check the list on your phone. If you dictate in more than one language, the guide to dictation languages on iPhone and Android covers the settings. The iPhone dictation guide covers the basic setup.

Test any app with your own voice before you pay

A five-minute test tells you more than any ranking. Use text you would really write, such as a work email or a paragraph of notes, and test in the place where you will use the app.

1. Read a passage of about 200 words aloud, in the room where you will dictate most.
2. Dictate the same passage with the built-in key, then with the app you are testing.
3. Count the words the app got wrong. That gives a word error rate, which is the number of wrong words divided by the total in the correct text. See word error rate.
4. Turn on Airplane Mode and repeat step 2 to see whether the app still works offline.
5. Check what the app asks for. A microphone permission is normal. Access to contacts, photos or your full keyboard history is a reason to stop.

Repeat the test on a second day, since recognition depends on background noise, your accent and the words you use. If you dictate long documents, time the session too. Speech at 153 words per minute ⁸ is fast, so a slow app shows up quickly in a long test.

For the wider picture, see the glossary entry for on-device speech recognition, our overview of dictation on phones and tablets, the guide to dictation and voice typing and the guide to speech recognition. Yap, which we make, is a dictation app for Mac and Windows, so this guide does not rank it. For the platforms we currently support, see our download page.