Raycast did not start as a dictation tool. It is a Spotlight replacement that has grown a clipboard manager, a window manager, an AI chat, a notes app and, since a beta that shipped in May 2026, a dictation feature. Coii VoiceInput started as a dictation tool and has grown nothing else. Both of those are reasonable ways to build software, and which one you want depends on whether you were already about to buy a launcher.
Checked 6 September 2026 against raycast.com and the Raycast manual.
What Raycast's dictation does
Press a hotkey, or hold it for push-to-talk, and a floating "Dictation Pill" appears with a live waveform and a timer. Speak, and the words land in the active app with filler words stripped and punctuation, capitalisation and grammar handled for you. "Styles" reshape the output for context — a short Slack line versus a formal email — and "Auto Styling" picks one for you based on the app you are dictating into. Custom Instructions, a personal vocabulary list and App Context tune it further. Every transcription is saved to a searchable Dictation History. On iOS and iPadOS, the same feature lives inside the Raycast Keyboard, so it reaches most text fields on the phone too — a platform this app does not have at all.
Two things are worth stating plainly because Raycast's own pages disagree with each other about them. The manual says dictation is "free for everyone" during its current beta. The pricing page lists it as included in Pro, at $10/month or $8/month billed yearly, and not in the free tier. Both are Raycast's own words, checked the same day; which one is true by the time you read this is not something a comparison page can settle for you. The manual also states dictation is cloud-based — audio leaves the Mac to be transcribed, though Raycast says it is not retained on their servers or used to train models — and sessions are capped at 20 minutes.
What Coii VoiceInput does
Hold ⌥ Space, say the sentence, let go. The words are typed into whatever field you were already in, about half a second later. $19 once, three devices, macOS 13 Ventura or later, thirty days' trial with every feature and no card. It has no clipboard manager, no window manager, no AI chat and no notes app — dictation is the only feature there is to buy.
The table
| Coii VoiceInput | Raycast Dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | Free in beta; $8–10/mo listed for Pro |
| Billing | One-time | Subscription (Raycast Pro) |
| What you're buying it inside | Nothing else — dictation is the app | A full launcher: clipboard, windows, AI chat, notes |
| Platforms | macOS only | macOS and iOS, via the Raycast Keyboard |
| Works with no network | Yes, after the first launch | No — cloud transcription |
| What leaves the machine | Nothing | Audio, to Raycast's servers |
| Model training on your voice | No — nothing is sent anywhere to train on | Raycast states no |
| Session length limit | None | 20 minutes per session |
| Auto text styling per app | No | Yes — Styles and Auto Styling |
| Where the text lands | Decided at key-down, before you speak | Not stated |
| Words saved before transcription finishes | Yes, to history, before the engine is asked | Not stated |
| Dictation history on-device | Yes | Yes, in Raycast |
Where Raycast wins
It is already a launcher you might want anyway. If Clipboard History, window snapping, Quicklinks and an AI chat are things you were going to buy regardless, dictation arrives as one more Pro feature rather than a second purchase and a second menu bar icon.
Auto Styling is a genuinely useful idea. Shaping a Slack message differently from an email, automatically, based on which app has focus, is a feature this app does not attempt. Coii VoiceInput types what you said; it does not rewrite it for tone.
iOS. Raycast's dictation reaches the iPhone and iPad through its keyboard. This app is a Mac menu bar utility and has no story for a phone at all.
A personal vocabulary and app-aware context. Raycast lets you teach it names and jargon and give it context about the app you're dictating into. This app has no equivalent — it does not learn or adapt to your vocabulary over time.
Where Coii VoiceInput wins
Nothing leaves the Mac, ever
Run the migration against staging first, then tag the release once the tests are green.
Raycast's own manual is upfront that dictation is cloud-based: your voice leaves the machine to be transcribed, even though Raycast says it is not kept or trained on afterwards. For most sentences that distinction will not matter to most people. For a sentence dictated on a flight, on a locked-down laptop, or into a field you would rather not hand to a third server at all, it is the entire decision, and this app is architecturally unable to make the other choice — there is nowhere in it for the audio to go.
The words are saved before anything downstream can lose them
- 1Key downthe target is chosen here
- 2You speaklevel meter, over your work
- 3Key up
- 4Written to historybefore the engine is asked
- 5Engineon your Mac
- 6Typedabout half a second
Raycast's manual does not publish an ordering guarantee for what happens if a dictation session is interrupted mid-transcription, so this page will not speculate about it. What Coii VoiceInput does is specific: the transcript is written to your local history the moment you let go of the key, before the engine is asked anything. A slow model, a crashed process or a paste that never arrives is a line in a list you can find, not a sentence you have to re-remember and retype.
$19 once, not a Pro subscription you keep paying for a launcher you may not use
Raycast Pro is $8–10 a month for the whole launcher, of which dictation is one feature — reasonable if you use the rest of it, and an odd price to pay if you only ever wanted the hotkey. $19 once buys the hotkey and nothing else, forever, with no renewal.
What a beta feature moving behind a paywall actually risks
Software that ships as "free during the beta" almost always narrows later — that is what a beta is for, and Raycast has been straightforward that dictation currently sits in that window. The risk isn't that Raycast is doing anything unusual; it's the ordinary shape of how a feature like this gets priced once usage data comes in. If you build a workflow around a beta feature today, the honest planning assumption is that the price you see written on the pricing page — Pro, $8–10 a month — is closer to where it lands than the manual's "free for everyone" note describing where it is right now. A $19 one-time app has the opposite risk profile: the price cannot move on you after you've paid it, because there's no ongoing relationship for a company to renegotiate.
The receiving app, and who actually does the typing
Every dictation tool in this category, cloud or local, ends at the same mechanical step: putting text into a field that expects a keyboard. How that step behaves is mostly a property of the app receiving the words, not the tool sending them, and it's where the architecture underneath actually starts to matter rather than the feature list on a marketing page.
A cloud-based pipeline like Raycast's has an extra hop built into every single dictation: microphone to Mac, Mac to Raycast's servers, transcription, and the result back down before anything can be typed. Raycast's manual is careful to say that audio isn't retained and isn't used for training, which addresses the privacy question but not the latency one — a round trip over the network is a round trip over the network, and it exists on every dictation regardless of network conditions on a given day. This app's engine runs on the Mac that's already in front of you, so there's one fewer place for a slow or dropped connection to turn a two-second pause into a much longer one.
Where the text actually lands is the other half of the receiving-app problem. Ordinary macOS text fields are the easy case for any tool in this category. Electron apps, which frequently draw their own text fields outside the normal system APIs, and terminals, which have their own ideas about what a paste means, are the harder cases — and neither Raycast's documentation nor this page can promise a specific outcome for every app on your Mac. What this app does specifically is try the accessibility API first, fall back to a synthetic paste where that API can't reach, and put your clipboard back afterwards either way, so a hard case costs you a restored clipboard rather than a silently overwritten one.
What frequent dictation actually looks like, day to day
The comparison changes shape depending on how many times a day you press the key, and it's worth being specific about why. Somebody who dictates two or three times a day — a paragraph here, a longer note there — is unlikely to notice a half-second of network latency or a 20-minute session cap; neither constraint gets anywhere near being felt at that volume, and Raycast's other features may well be worth more to that person than any of the differences on this page.
The picture changes once dictation becomes a reflex rather than an occasional tool — the two-second commit message, the four-word Slack reply, the one-sentence note to yourself before you forget it. At that frequency, small frictions compound: a round trip that adds even a few hundred milliseconds becomes noticeable dozens of times a day, and a 20-minute session cap starts to matter to anyone who leaves a recording running through a long working session rather than tapping the hotkey fresh each time. None of this makes Raycast's implementation wrong — it's a reasonable trade for a feature bundled into a much larger cloud-synced app — but it is the specific place where a narrower, local-only tool built around nothing but the hotkey starts to pull ahead for a specific kind of user.
What neither app does
Neither one controls the rest of your Mac. Raycast the launcher does plenty outside of dictation — clipboard history, window management, an AI chat — but none of it is voice-driven, and neither is this app: both simply convert speech to text at a cursor, nothing more. If what you actually want is to click buttons and switch apps hands-free, that's Voice Control, built into macOS for free, or Talon for a more powerful, purpose-built version of the same idea.
Neither app is going to get proper nouns right by magic, either. Names, product terms and anything with an unusual spelling are the weak point of speech recognition generally, cloud or local, expensive or free — Raycast's personal vocabulary list is a real answer to part of that problem and this app does not have an equivalent, which is worth weighing if your dictation involves a lot of unusual names. And neither one is going to sound great over a laptop microphone in a loud room; that's a hardware problem before it's a software one, in this category and every other one like it.
The arithmetic over a year, once the beta ends
If Raycast's dictation settles at the price its own pricing page currently lists — $8 a month billed yearly, $10 billed monthly — that's $96 to $120 a year for the feature alone, assuming you're paying for Raycast Pro primarily to get it rather than for the launcher's other tools. Compared against $19 once, the crossover point is under three months. That arithmetic doesn't account for the rest of what Pro includes — cloud sync, unlimited clipboard history, custom themes — which is exactly the point: if you value those features on their own terms, the dictation feature arrives essentially free alongside them, and this comparison is moot. If dictation was the only reason you were going to pay Raycast anything, the arithmetic above is the actual decision.
Two histories, kept two different ways
Both apps keep a record of what you said, but the underlying premise is different. Raycast's Dictation History lives inside a cloud-synced app, alongside your clipboard history, snippets and notes — part of a broader workspace that's designed to follow you across machines through Raycast's own sync. This app's history is a flat local log, kept for one reason only: so a paste that didn't land is a copy you can find, not a sentence you have to reconstruct from memory. It doesn't sync, doesn't search across projects, and isn't meant to be a workspace — it's the safety net underneath a single keypress, and nothing more ambitious than that.
What "not retained" means, and what it doesn't
Raycast's claim that audio isn't retained on its servers and isn't used to train models is a real, specific commitment, and it's worth taking at face value rather than reading past it. It answers the question "will my voice end up training somebody's model" — no — and the question "does Raycast keep my recordings" — also no. It doesn't answer a third, narrower question: whether the audio is processed on a server at all before being discarded, which by Raycast's own description of cloud-based transcription, it is. For most dictation this distinction won't be the deciding factor. For dictation into a field you'd rather no server touch even transiently, it's the one this app was built to make moot, since there's no server in the path to begin with.
What switching actually costs
If you already pay for Raycast Pro for its other features, buying this app on top is a second $19 purchase and a second hotkey to remember — genuinely a cost, and worth weighing against just using the dictation you already have. There is nothing to migrate: Raycast's Dictation History and this app's history are both short local logs of what you said, not documents, so there is no export or import step either way. If Raycast's dictation moves fully behind Pro when its beta ends and that changes your monthly bill, this app is the one-time alternative sitting next to it.
Who should pick which
Pick Raycast's dictation if you already use or want Raycast for its other features, you also dictate on your phone, or Auto Styling's per-app formatting is something you'd actually use.
Pick Coii VoiceInput if dictation is the only feature you were shopping for, you would rather pay once than watch a beta feature move behind a subscription, or nothing leaving the machine is a requirement rather than a preference.
For the rest of the field: Wispr Flow is the other cloud subscription in this comparison set, Apple Dictation is the free option already on your Mac, Google Voice Typing is the free browser-based one, and a Whisper CLI script is the option if you'd rather build it yourself. If it's the Mac's own hands-free control layer you're actually weighing this against, see Voice Control instead — a different feature with a similar name.
Pricing is one line and the download is thirty days, every feature, no card.