Raycast Dictation is a feature of the Raycast launcher, not a standalone app — cloud-only, with no disclosed speech model, currently free during a beta with unannounced pricing after.
Raycast Dictation ships inside the Raycast launcher on macOS and Windows (since June 2026), plus iOS through the Raycast Keyboard. It's cloud-only — Raycast does not publicly name its speech-to-text partner or model, and there's no user model choice. It's free during the current beta, with pricing after the beta unannounced. It has a 20-minute session cap and no Android build.
It does ship genuinely good ideas worth naming on their own merits: Auto Styling that picks a tone based on the app or website you're dictating into, Custom Vocabulary, Custom Instructions, single-tap modifier hotkeys, and team-shared Dictation Styles. Transcriptions and usage statistics are stored locally and never sent as telemetry — a real, specific claim, distinct from where the audio itself is processed.
Auto Styling — automatically adapting tone based on the app or website you're dictating into — is a genuinely useful idea, as are Custom Vocabulary and Custom Instructions for steering output without a settings menu. Team-shared Dictation Styles is a distinctly B2B feature nothing else in this research offers. None of that requires knowing what model does the actual transcription, which is precisely the part Raycast doesn't disclose.
It's also worth crediting explicitly and separately: Raycast states transcriptions and usage statistics are stored locally and never sent as telemetry. That's a real, narrower privacy claim, distinct from — and not a substitute for — where the audio itself is processed, which is their cloud.
Raycast Dictation has no Android build, no offline mode, and doesn't name its transcription model or subprocessor publicly — you're trusting a launcher plugin with your voice without knowing what processes it. OpenWispr runs on Android, works with no internet connection at all, and its model (Parakeet-TDT by default, or Whisper) is named, selectable, and checkable in open-source code.
Raycast's pricing is also an open question: free during the current beta, with no stated plan for after. OpenWispr's pricing has one state: free, permanently, because there's no cloud infrastructure cost driving a future price.
Open source and entirely on your device. Android from Google Play, macOS from GitHub — no account, no sign-up, just a download.