Speech to Text Without a Weekly Word Limit
Most free dictation apps stop working after about 2,000 words a week. Resonant doesn't count your words at all — speech recognition runs on your Mac, so there is nothing to meter.
Direct answer
Resonant is a free speech-to-text app for Mac with no weekly word limit. It processes audio 100% on-device on Apple Silicon, works offline, needs no account, and never sends audio to a server. Weekly word caps exist to recover cloud costs; Resonant has no cloud speech costs, so it has no cap.
Why free dictation apps have word limits
Cloud speech-to-text costs the vendor money on every sentence you speak. Audio is uploaded, run through a server-side model, and the text is sent back. To keep the free tier from being a loss, vendors cap it — usually at a few thousand words per week — and sell the “unlimited” version for $12 to $15 a month.
Two thousand words sounds like a lot until you measure it. People speak at roughly 130 to 150 words per minute, so a 2,000-word weekly cap is about 15 minutes of talking. One long email reply, one meeting debrief, or a single afternoon of dictating prompts into an AI coding tool can exhaust it by Tuesday. The rest of the week, the app is a paywall.
How Resonant removes the limit
Resonant runs speech recognition on the Apple Silicon Neural Engine in your Mac. There is no server in the loop for dictation, so there is no per-word cost to recover, no usage meter, and no reason to stop you mid-sentence. You can dictate a 10,000-word document on Monday and another on Tuesday.
The same architecture is why Resonant works offline, needs no account for local dictation, and never uploads audio. The absence of a word limit isn't a promotional tier that can be revoked — it's a consequence of where the computation happens.
No word limit vs. cloud free tiers
| Feature | Resonant | Cloud dictation apps |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly word limit (free plan) | None | Typically 2,000 words/week |
| What happens at the cap | Nothing — there is no cap | Dictation stops until you upgrade or the week resets |
| Cost to remove the limit | $0 — local dictation is free | $12–$15/month subscription |
| Where speech is processed | On your Mac (Apple Silicon Neural Engine) | Vendor servers |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Audio leaves your device | Never | Every dictation |
| Account required to dictate | No | Yes |
Who runs into the cap fastest
- People prompting AI tools. Long instructions to Claude Code, Cursor, or ChatGPT are hundreds of words each. See voice dictation for Claude Code.
- Writers and founders. Drafting by voice is 3–4x faster than typing, which means you hit a word cap 3–4x faster too. See dictation vs. typing speed.
- Clinicians and consultants. Notes after every appointment add up to thousands of words a day, and the audio often can't leave the device anyway. See private medical dictation for Mac.
- Anyone with wrist strain. A word limit on your primary input method isn't an inconvenience — it's an accessibility problem. See speech to text for wrist strain.
What's free and what's Pro
Everything about turning speech into text is free and unmetered: on-device recognition, dictation into any Mac app, voice memos, and a personal dictionary. The optional Pro plan adds cloud text cleanup, voice rewrites, summaries, and shareable memos. Pro sends transcript text for those features, never audio, and you never need it to lift a dictation word cap — there isn't one.
Other apps without a word limit
If you want to compare on-device options, these also run speech recognition locally and don't meter words:
- SuperWhisper— local, highly configurable, paid tiers for advanced models.
- VoiceInk— open-source local dictation, more DIY.
- Apple Dictation— built in and free, but lower accuracy and limited control.
For the cloud apps with weekly caps, see the Wispr Flow alternative comparison and the full Mac dictation tools comparison.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a speech-to-text app without a weekly word limit?
Yes. Resonant's local dictation for Mac has no weekly word limit. Speech recognition runs entirely on your Mac's Apple Silicon, so there is no cloud compute to meter and no word quota to enforce. Dictate as many words as you want, every week, for free.
Why do dictation apps have weekly word limits?
Cloud dictation apps pay for server-side speech recognition on every word you speak. A weekly word cap on the free tier (commonly 2,000 words) limits that cost and pushes users toward a paid plan. On-device apps like Resonant run speech recognition on your own hardware, so there is no per-word cost to recover.
How many words is 2,000 words per week?
At a typical speaking pace of 130 to 150 words per minute, 2,000 words is roughly 15 minutes of dictation for the entire week. A single long email thread, a meeting debrief, or one afternoon of prompting an AI coding tool can use it up.
Does Resonant charge per word or per minute?
No. Local speech-to-text in Resonant is free and is not metered by words, minutes, or characters. The optional Pro plan adds cloud text cleanup, rewrites, summaries, and sharing, but it is not required to remove any dictation word cap because there is none.
Does unlimited speech to text work offline?
Yes. Because Resonant processes audio on-device, it works with no internet connection at all. Offline is also why there is no word limit: nothing is being sent to a server that could count or bill it.
Which speech-to-text apps have a weekly word cap on the free plan?
Wispr Flow caps free users at 2,000 words per week. Several other cloud dictation tools use similar weekly or monthly word or minute quotas on their free tiers. Resonant, SuperWhisper, and VoiceInk run locally and do not meter words.
What Mac do I need for unlimited on-device dictation?
Resonant requires a Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or later) running macOS 14 or newer. Speech recognition runs on the Neural Engine, which is what makes free, unmetered dictation practical.
What Resonant offers beyond dictation
Resonant isn't just a faster way to type. It's a voice workspace with capabilities no other dictation tool provides.
MCP server for AI tools
Resonant exposes 11 MCP tools that let any AI agent — Claude, Codex, and more — query your entire voice workspace — meetings, dictations, memos, ambient context, and daily journal. Your AI assistant knows what you said this morning. Learn more
Meeting transcription with speaker labels
Dual-channel recording — your mic and system audio on separate channels. NVIDIA Sortformer diarization identifies who said what. No bot joins the call. No audio leaves your Mac. Learn more
Ambient context capture
Passively records which apps you use, window titles, URLs, and dwell time — all locally. This makes dictation context-aware and gives your AI tools a queryable work timeline. Learn more
Two on-device speech models
NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v3 (0.6B, 25 languages) and Qwen3 ASR (0.6B, 30+ languages), both compiled to CoreML and running on Apple Neural Engine. Under 4% WER on English benchmarks. Learn more
Cloud cleanup with hallucination detection
Optional AI post-processing fixes STT errors and adapts to context (email, message, code). Guardrails detect when the LLM rewrites your meaning instead of cleaning your grammar. Learn more
Start with private Mac dictation
Local speech recognition is free and runs on your Mac. Pro adds cloud cleanup, rewrites, summaries, and sharing when you want the full workflow.