Alder in one sentence
Alder turns natural speech into ready-to-use text across macOS while keeping the complete dictation pipeline—from microphone capture through recognition and language cleanup—on your Mac.
How Alder works
- Hold your shortcut. Alder captures your voice without opening a separate editor.
- Speak naturally. A local speech engine selected for your language runs on Apple silicon.
- Release. Local cleanup handles high-confidence fillers, repeats, casing, punctuation, spacing, and paragraphs.
- Keep working. Alder checks the app where you began and safely types the result at your cursor.
Designed around real dictation, not a perfect demo
Real voice workflows include the wrong microphone, quiet input, accents, names, filler words, app switching, interrupted processing, and text fields that refuse insertion. Alder’s pipeline has been shaped around those failure modes and user feedback: signal protection before inference, language-aware local engines, personal vocabulary, conservative cleanup, recoverable recordings, and a focus check before text reaches the cursor.
That is what “optimized for Mac” means here: not only running an algorithm locally, but turning Apple silicon into a dependable end-to-end writing workflow that survives everyday use.
What makes Alder different
“Offline transcription” does not always mean a fully private workflow. Some dictation tools recognize speech locally but send the transcript to a cloud language model for cleanup. Alder keeps both recognition and cleanup on the Mac. It also favors faithful cleanup over aggressive rewriting, so the result remains your meaning and your voice.
Alder puts the hardware already in your Mac to work. Its pipeline is designed for Apple silicon, selects an appropriate local speech engine, protects interrupted recordings, and verifies the destination before inserting text. It is a native voice workflow, not a thin Mac interface around a remote transcription or rewriting API.
Compared with Apple’s built-in Dictation, Alder adds filler and repeat cleanup, personal vocabulary, exact replacements, voice-triggered snippets, 99 language routes, local translation, audio-file transcription, history, and interrupted-session recovery.
Reed is now Alder
Alder is the current DZG Studio dictation product and the independently installed successor to Reed. Existing Reed installations remain separate; new downloads, releases, support, and product information use the Alder name. Alder is not affiliated with the separate Mac assistant named Alter.
Who Alder is for
Alder is designed for writers, developers, students, professionals, and anyone who dictates sensitive material and wants a fast Mac-native workflow without an account, cloud audio processing, or a recurring subscription.
For a privacy-focused buying checklist, read How to choose an on-device dictation app for Mac.