The best Dragon NaturallySpeaking alternatives for Mac

Voice Control is the closest thing to Dragon on a Mac, and it's free. Turn it on in Accessibility settings and you can open apps, click buttons and scroll by voice: “Open Mail”, “Click Done”. Say “Show numbers” to label everything on screen, or “Show grid” to click any spot. It edits text by voice too, like “Replace cat with dog”, and has a spelling mode for odd words.

It also covers Dragon's customizations. Apple says you can add up to 1,000 custom vocabulary terms in supported languages and teach Voice Control how to say them. You can create your own commands that paste text, press a keyboard shortcut or run a Shortcut, which handles most boilerplate and simple macros.

One catch: when Voice Control is on, it does the dictating, and standard Apple Dictation isn't available. Plain Apple Dictation is fine for short messages, adds punctuation in supported languages, and stops after 30 seconds of silence. For longer writing, see our Apple Dictation alternatives.

Koi is for people who type with their hands and would rather talk. Press Fn + ⌥ in any app and speak: words appear as you go and tidy themselves up. Speech is turned into text on your Mac with Whisper, so it works offline, detects 57 languages by itself and is unlimited on every plan, Free included. It ignores music, video and loud rooms.

The Dragon-like part is the assistant. Hold Fn + ⌘, select some text and say “make it shorter” or “fix the grammar”, and Koi rewrites it in place; ⌘Z takes it back. Ask it to “click Skip” or “scroll down” and it uses the Mac with real clicks and keys. It never buys, sends, posts, deletes, signs in or types a password, and that's enforced in the app. Those calls use cloud AI models, so your voice goes to the model provider while a call lasts.

Where Dragon users should be careful: Koi has no custom vocabulary and no custom commands, and it starts with a key press, so it isn't a hands-free system. If you can't use a keyboard, Voice Control or Talon is the right tool. Koi is Mac only, needs macOS 14 or later, and Pro is $20 a month, or $99 once for Lifetime.

Superwhisper lets you enter names, abbreviations and special terms once so they come out right, which is the Dragon feature most people miss. Its modes shape what you say into a message, an email or a document, and its free tier includes local Whisper models that work offline and meeting recording.

Pro, $8.49 a month at the time of writing, adds cloud models, translation and transcription of audio and video files. It runs on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. Its FAQ says Intel Macs work best with the cloud models. Our Superwhisper alternatives page compares it with the rest.

Wispr Flow learns your names and jargon, and keeps a dictionary plus snippets: say a short phrase and it expands into an email address, a link or a bio, a lot like Dragon's auto-texts. It runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android in 100+ languages. Wispr says its dictation is HIPAA-ready with a signed BAA, which matters if you came from Dragon Medical.

Wispr's privacy page says transcription always happens in the cloud. Free is 2,000 words a week on desktop, and Pro is $15 per user a month at the time of writing. See our Wispr Flow alternatives if you'd rather keep your voice on the Mac.

If you used Dragon to turn recorded audio into text, MacWhisper is the replacement. Drag in an audio or video file and it transcribes on your Mac with local models, in 100 languages, for free. Pro adds batch transcription, speaker recognition and watched folders that transcribe new files by themselves, much like Dragon's folder agent. It also has system-wide dictation.

Pro is a one-time license, €64 on its site at the time of writing.

Talon is the power tool for people who can't or don't want to use their hands. It does commands and dictation, moves the mouse where you look, and clicks or scrolls with mouth sounds: a pop to click, a hiss to scroll. Custom commands are written in small .talon files, so it rewards some setup.

It runs on macOS, Windows and Linux, and Talon+ adds more features and better support.

If your work requires Dragon, it means Windows. For Dragon Medical One, Microsoft documents three ways to use it with a Mac: in a Windows virtual machine with Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion, as a published app through Citrix, or with Windows installed through Boot Camp, which Apple supports only on Intel Macs.

The catch, from that page: in a virtual machine, dictation at the cursor isn't supported in native Mac apps, so Dragon works in the Windows apps and moving text over to Mac apps isn't officially supported. We couldn't find the same guidance for Dragon Professional, so check with Nuance before you buy a license to run that way.