I have been using Amical since its beta phase. What sets it apart from the flood of recent dictation tools is its focus on power-user features and privacy. It is open source and supports local models, allowing for a completely offline workflow. The developers are even looking into bringing local models to mobile devices.

Amical's custom vocabulary handles unusual names, and its "snippets" feature replaces your standalone text expander tool. A magic word inserts boilerplate content of any length.

Amical figures out the language you speak and does a good job at it. Yet, you can also bypass auto-detection and store presets for languages you'll use for dictation. This will likely save a few tokens and help speed and accuracy.

Most comparable tools work in many languages, yet Amical even ads support for specific language subsets like Swiss German.

But not everything is perfect. On Windows, I ran into problems with certain hotkeys – causing text-insertion to be buggy. It's fixed now. If the network connection is unstable – which can happen where I live – Amical allows you to switch from cloud processing to a local engine and carry on dictating. You can't do that with most other tools.

If you are looking for a capable dictation assistant that actually works offline, I can highly recommend giving Amical a try.