The best offline speech to text for Windows
Lven Instant is the best offline speech to text for Windows: on the PC, offline after setup, no word cap, never rewrites, and the only app here with a published measurement — about six times faster than you speak at a 3.76% word error rate. It is free. The ranking below covers one-time purchases, open source and voice commands.
- Transcription runs on the PC, not on a server
- Works with the network off after setup
- What it does to your words
- Usage limits and price shape
- Published speed and accuracy
The only dictation product compared on this site that is always on-device, never rewrites your words, has no usage cap and ships on Linux — and it is free.
Right for: Daily dictation on a Windows PC, offline, with the same account on Linux and Android.
On-device push-to-talk dictation for Windows only, as a $29 one-time purchase.
Right for: One Windows machine and the lowest one-time price.
On-device dictation for Mac and Windows as a one-time purchase.
Right for: One person, one Mac or Windows machine, a single payment.
Free, MIT-licensed Whisper dictation that runs offline, for people happy to manage models themselves. On the same hardware where Lven Instant's engine runs about six times faster than you speak, whisper-large-v3 never reaches realtime.
Right for: Free and open source above everything, and comfortable troubleshooting models and configs yourself.
The professional suite: deep voice commands, corrections by voice, medical and legal vocabularies, at professional prices and with a real learning curve.
Right for: Hands-free control of the whole computer, or a workplace that already standardizes on Dragon.
Free, built in, and on most configurations it sends your audio to Microsoft's online speech service.
Right for: Occasional dictation with zero setup and zero cost, when cloud processing is not a concern.
Common questions.
Does Windows have built-in offline speech to text?
Does offline speech to text need a GPU?
Is anything sent to a server at all?
- Wispr Flow pricing page — Pro $15/user/mo monthly or $12/user/mo billed annually; free tier 2,000 words/week on desktop
- Digital Trends — Wispr Flow traces accuracy complaints to an over-aggressive Auto Cleanup that changed words
- Typeless — home page and pricing page: Mac, Windows, iOS and Android; polished-writing rewrite; free tier 8,000 words/week; $12/member/mo billed yearly, $30 monthly
- Superwhisper — AI voice to text for macOS, Windows and iOS; offline and cloud models
- ClassEve — the engine Lven Instant ships vs. Whisper-class models, measured on consumer-grade hardware (speed, accuracy, latency)
- ClassEve — What the polish pass changes: the 31-case golden corpus