Outloud: Offline Dictation

Speak, and get finished text on your clipboard. Transcription and cleanup run on your iPhone: no account, no cloud, no subscription, no word limit.

Speak, and get finished text. Outloud records what you say, turns it into text on your iPhone, removes the filler words, sets punctuation and paragraphs, and puts the result on your clipboard. Paste it into a message, an email, a note or a document.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN Speech recognition runs on your iPhone, and the cleanup uses Apple Intelligence's model on your iPhone. Neither your voice nor your text is sent anywhere. The only download is the speech recognition model, once, at the first launch. After that Outloud works in flight mode.

FINISHED TEXT, NOT A RAW TRANSCRIPT "Um", "uh" and other filler words go, punctuation and paragraphs are set, and your words stay yours: Outloud does not rephrase what you said. Say "new paragraph" to start one. Cleanup is optional; switch it off and you get the transcript as spoken.

DICTATE FROM ANY APP Set up the "Start or Stop Dictation with Outloud" shortcut once, then run it from the Action Button, Back Tap, Siri or the Control Center while you stay in the app you are typing in. A Live Activity shows the recording and the progress; run it again, and the cleaned text is on your clipboard. The app explains each way step by step.

OR OPEN OUTLOUD AND TALK Tap the record button, speak, tap again. The text is copied, and you can see it, copy it again, or listen to the recording.

A HISTORY YOU CONTROL Outloud keeps your recent dictations with their audio, the transcript and the cleaned version, for as long as you choose: not at all, a day, up to three months, or without limit. One day is the default. Delete a single result or all of them at any time.

ENGLISH AND GERMAN Built and tested for English and German. The speech recognition model understands 25 European languages.

FREE, WITH NO CATCH No account, no subscription, no word limit, no ads, no tracking. Outloud is open source under the MIT license.

REQUIREMENTS

• The speech recognition model is a one-time download of about 480 MB.
• Cleanup needs an iPhone with Apple Intelligence, switched on. Without it, Outloud gives you the transcript.
• Outloud cannot type into other apps; you paste the text where you want it.