Speakhold
Speakhold vs Willow Voice
Speakhold started as a replacement for Willow. Same hold-a-key dictation, no subscription, and the audio never leaves your Mac.
Where they are the same
Both give you push-to-talk dictation anywhere on the Mac: hold a key, speak, let go, and the text lands at your cursor in whatever app is in front. Both tidy the raw transcript so you get sentences rather than a stream of "um"s. Both have a small bar that shows you are being heard.
Where they differ
| Speakhold | Willow Voice | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, MIT licence | US$12–15 a month |
| Where speech-to-text runs | Yes, on your Mac (Whisper on the Neural Engine) | Cloud by default |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Hotkey | Any chord; left and right modifiers are different keys | Fixed options |
| Cleanup without a key | Yes, Apple Intelligence on-device (macOS 26) | Cloud |
| Records calls and writes notes | Yes, both sides, no bot | No |
| Open source | Yes | No |
| App size | One native Swift binary, a 12 MB download | Native |
As of October 2026. Corrections welcome via pull request.
Why people switch
The usual reason is the recurring charge for something that a Mac can do on its own chip. The second is privacy: with Willow your audio is uploaded to be transcribed, with Speakhold it is converted to 16 kHz mono, transcribed in-process and discarded. The third is the hotkey. Speakhold tells left ⌃ from right ⌃, so you can pick a chord that collides with nothing else on your keyboard.
Why you might stay with Willow
Willow is polished, supported by a company, and does not need a 630 MB model download on first launch. If you are on an Intel Mac, Speakhold will not run at all. If you want someone to email when something breaks, a paid product is the right call. Speakhold is open source with issues on GitHub.
Is Speakhold really free?
Yes. MIT licence, no account, no trial. The optional Claude polish uses your own key or your own Claude Code login, and that is the only thing that can cost anything.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Dictation and meeting transcription run on-device. Only the optional Claude engine needs a connection.
How accurate is it compared to Willow?
Both use Whisper-class models. Speakhold runs Whisper Large v3 Turbo; the difference you will notice is latency, which depends on your Mac, not the network.
Can I move my dictionary over?
Speakhold has a personal dictionary and text replacements under Settings → Cleanup. Paste your names and terms in, one per line.
Try it
Free · MIT · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · brew install --cask sturzael/tap/speakhold
Compared with Willow Voice · Wispr Flow · Superwhisper · MacWhisper · Fireflies · Otter · How to record a call without a bot