If you dictate in more than one language, there is one thing MacWhisper cannot do for you, and it is the thing that makes dictation usable at all. Holos was built for exactly that.
I'll send the draft tonight. Pero primero hay que revisarlo todo.
One dictation · two languages · no setting changed
In MacWhisper, and in every other dictation app on the Mac, that comes back wrong. Whisper decides on a language once, when the recording starts, and holds it. So your second sentence is either spelled out phonetically in the first language, which is gibberish, or silently translated, which is worse, because it looks correct and is not what you said.
Holos asks the question once per sentence. It splits the audio where you paused, because a pause is where a bilingual actually changes language, and identifies each piece on its own. Nothing to configure. You hold a key, you talk, and the right words appear.
Try it in the next five minutes. Fourteen days free, no card, no account, nothing to cancel.
macOS 26 · Apple silicon · signed and notarised
Because the obvious approach fails, and it fails hardest between languages that resemble one another. Spanish and Portuguese. Czech and Slovak. Let Whisper choose freely among all ninety-nine and it is unreliable on anything short or noisy: on one second of real speech in a close pair it scored the wrong language at 0.948 against 0.032. Confidently, completely wrong, and the wrong answer is the one that changes what your words mean.
Holos narrows the question to the languages you actually speak, because a language outranking yours cannot win if it is not a candidate. Then it adds probabilities together by language family before comparing, since Ukrainian on a real microphone often lands as Slovak, Czech and Polish at once — the model being sure about the family and unsure inside it. That one change took a test set from four correct out of seven to seven out of seven.
Every number on this page came out of a bilingual person's own microphone, over months, because he needed it to work. It applies to whichever languages you speak: twenty-nine have been tested switching in and out of English and got every sentence right.
| Holos | MacWhisper | |
|---|---|---|
| Switching language mid-paragraph | Yes, per sentence | One language per recording |
| Tells you which language it heard | Live, while you speak | No |
| Apple's on-device engine where it fits | Yes, instant, no download | Whisper only |
| Teach it your own words and shortcuts | Yes | No |
| Audio leaves your Mac | Never | Never |
| Try before you pay | 14 days, no card | Limited free tier |
| Cost to start | $39 / year | €64 up front |
MacWhisper is a transcription app that also dictates. Its centre of gravity is files: drop in an interview, get a transcript. Dictation is one feature among many.
Holos does one thing. Every decision in it — identifying the language per sentence, showing you live what it heard, learning the words you use, putting the text exactly where your cursor is — exists to make speaking into your Mac feel like typing, in whichever language you happen to be thinking in. If that is the problem you have, a general transcription tool is not going to solve it, however good it is at transcribing files.
Fourteen days, free, no card. If Holos does not keep up with your languages, you have lost nothing but the download.
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$39 a year · thirty days to change your mind · one licence covers every Mac you use
MacWhisper is a good app by a developer who has been at it for years, and this page is not a criticism of it. Details checked against macwhisper.com in September 2026. If anything here is out of date, tell me and I will correct it.