u/Fit_Statistician2649 — reddlx

What are you guys using for dictation at home?

Hospital has Dragon set up on the workstations which is fine but when I'm finishing notes at home it's a completely different story. The licensing is ridiculous if you want it on a personal machine and half the time the mic doesn't work right outside the hospital setup. I've been looking at some of the newer apps but most of them are cloud based and I'm not sure how I feel about that for patient notes. Anyone found something that actually works well for home charting?

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u/Fit_Statistician2649 — 1 day ago

🔥 Hot ▲ 52 r/Residency

Is Dragon still worth it in 2026 or are there better alternatives now?

I keep seeing Dragon recommended everywhere for dictation but it seems like Nuance has been making weird decisions lately. They dropped Mac support, the pricing keeps going up, and now Microsoft owns them. For people who actually use voice-to-text daily — is Dragon still the go-to or have you moved to something else? Especially interested in anything that works offline since I'd rather not send my audio to someone's cloud. I've heard medical professionals used to swear by it but even they seem frustrated now. Curious what people are actually using these days.

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u/Fit_Statistician2649 — 1 day ago

🔥 Hot ▲ 83 r/MacOS+2 crossposts

SpeakUp — offline dictation app for Mac, built in Berlin. No cloud, no subscription, €29 once.

Hi everyone,

I work with a small team in Berlin that built SpeakUp — a dictation app for Mac that runs 100% on your device.

Why it exists: Most dictation tools (Wispr Flow, Otter, etc.) send your voice to US cloud servers. We thought Europeans deserve better. SpeakUp processes everything locally on your Mac's GPU using whisper.cpp. Nothing leaves your machine. Ever.

What makes it European:

- Built in Berlin by a bootstrapped solo founder

- Priced in euros — €29 one-time, forever. No subscription.

- Payment via Creem (Estonian company, EU merchant of record, handles EU VAT)

- No servers, no data collection, no tracking — GDPR-compliant by design, not by policy

How it works: Hold a keyboard shortcut, speak, release. Your words appear wherever your cursor is — any app, any text field. That's it.

What it doesn't do: No AI text rewriting. Your words, exactly as you said them. No "smart corrections."

14-day free trial, no credit card, no account: getspeakup.app

Currently Mac only. iOS and Windows coming soon.

Full disclosure: I'm part of the SpeakUp team. Happy to answer any questions!

u/Fit_Statistician2649 — 6 days ago