hushquill.com / compare / best free dictation for windows
A disclosure before anything else: we make HushQuill, one of the four tools below. So instead of a rigged scorecard, here is what each one is genuinely best at, including the cases where you should not pick ours.
The field
| HushQuill | Win+H voice typing | Voice Access | Wispr Flow free | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free limit | Unlimited dictation | Unlimited | Unlimited | 2,000 words per week |
| Processing | On your machine | Cloud (Azure) | On device after model download | Cloud |
| Works offline | Yes | No | Yes, once set up | No |
| Main job | Dictation into any app | Quick dictation | Controlling the PC by voice | Dictation with AI cleanup |
| Urdu, native script | Yes | No | No | Cloud processed |
| Install | 8.4 MB installer | Built in | Built in (Win 11) | App + account |
| Account needed | No | No | No | Yes |
Verified August 2026 against Microsoft's documentation and wisprflow.ai. Vendors change things; their pages win over this table.
Pick by situation
It is already on your machine and costs nothing. Press Win+H and talk. Its audio goes to Microsoft's Azure servers and it will not work on a plane, but for an occasional English paragraph neither may matter to you. If that is your whole use case, stop reading, you do not need any of us.
Voice Access (Windows 11) is an accessibility tool first: it clicks, scrolls, switches windows and also takes dictation, and it can work offline after a one-time speech model download. If voice is how you operate the computer, not just how you write, it is the right tool and none of the dictation apps replace it.
Wispr Flow's free plan gives you 2,000 words a week on desktop with genuinely good AI cleanup, and there are iPhone and Android apps. The trade: an account, a connection, your audio processed on their servers, and $15 a month once you outgrow the cap. Our full comparison is at HushQuill vs Wispr Flow.
This is the case we built for. Unlimited free dictation with no word cap, speech processed entirely on your own machine so it works offline and nothing crosses the wire, about 99 languages with Urdu and Hindi in native script, a personal dictionary, snippets, and AI formatting that adapts to the app you are typing into. The paid tier is one payment, not a subscription, and only covers the AI extras.
One rule of thumb
Every dictation tool answers one question differently: does your voice leave the machine? Win+H and Wispr Flow say yes, by design, because their engines live in the cloud. Voice Access and HushQuill say no, because the models run locally. If you dictate anything you would not paste into a public form, that one answer filters the field faster than any feature list.
The free build of HushQuill is the whole dictation engine, not a stripped demo. No account, no trial clock, no watermark. If it does not fit how you work, one of the other three above will, and the table tells you which.
Try it
One small installer. Speech models download inside the app on first run, so you choose what lands on disk.
Windows 10 and 11, macOS 11 and later. Free forever, no telemetry.