Free and open source, like Juno. Runs on the Mac you already have.
Juno's own site asks for an M2 Mac or newer, macOS 15, and 24GB of RAM. EnviousWispr runs on any Apple Silicon Mac starting with the original M1, on macOS 14 and later. Both are free, and both clean up your dictation on-device with no prompt to write.
Quick answer
Juno or EnviousWispr: which should you choose?
Both Juno and EnviousWispr are free, open source, and run speech processing on your Mac. Choose Juno if you have an M2 or newer Mac with at least 24GB of RAM and want voice-triggered Notes, Reminders, alarms, or spoken rewrites of selected text. Choose EnviousWispr if you have an M1 Mac, 16GB of RAM, or macOS 14, or if you want focused system-wide dictation with a smaller setup. Juno reaches beyond dictation into voice actions. EnviousWispr supports more existing Apple Silicon Macs and keeps the product centered on reliable speech-to-text, polish, and paste. The decision is unusually hardware-specific: on a supported high-memory Mac, compare the extra actions; on older or lower-memory models, EnviousWispr is the practical option.
Still deciding? See the best Mac dictation apps by use case or browse all 17 dictation app comparisons.
Feature comparison
An honest look at how the two tools stack up across the dimensions that matter most.
| EnviousWispr | Juno | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free. No subscription. | Free. No subscription, no usage cap. |
| Account required | No | No |
| Source code | Open source (GPLv3) | Open source (MIT) |
| Minimum Mac | Apple Silicon M1 or later | Apple Silicon M2 or later |
| Minimum macOS | 14 Sonoma | 15 Sequoia |
| Minimum RAM | None published | 24GB, stated on Juno's own site |
| AI polish (cleanup after transcription) | EG-1 (measured, purpose-built for dictation), Apple Intelligence, Ollama, or your own key | Yes, on-device: Qwen3 0.6B for live correction, Qwen3 4B Instruct for smart formatting, both separate downloads; no published benchmark |
| Needs a prompt to be written | No | No |
| Creates Notes, Reminders, or alarms by voice | No, dictation only | Yes; start the Voice Action with "Hey Juno" after dictation begins |
| Live preview while speaking | Yes, off by default | Yes, Live HUD transcript |
| Recover a cancelled dictation | Yes (Escape Recovery, opt-in, keybind/triple-press cancel only) | Not documented |
| Custom vocabulary | Yes (imports from 8 other apps, Juno included) | Yes, with automatic learning from clear edits |
| Snippets and direct replacements | No snippet expansion | Yes, both are built in |
| Selected-text writing commands | No | Yes, including shorter, longer, clearer, formal, casual, lists, translation, and replace |
| Per-app writing behavior | App context helps polish the current dictation | Yes, choose a Style and privacy behavior for each app |
| Transcription latency | 0.61s median; ~1.65s with on-device AI polish | Not published |
| Platform support | macOS (Apple Silicon, M1 and up) | macOS (Apple Silicon, M2 and up) |
Juno claims sourced from usejuno.co, github.com/Cassini-Research/Juno (GitHub API), a local install's Info.plist, and the installed app opened directly. EnviousWispr latency from production PostHog data on Apple Silicon Macs. Competitor claims last verified: 2026-08-21.
Both are free and open source. Here is what EnviousWispr adds
Juno asks for a newer Mac than we do. Beyond that, here is what else separates the two.
Juno's own site states it needs an M2 or newer Mac. EnviousWispr supports every Apple Silicon Mac, starting with the original M1 from 2020. If you have not upgraded, EnviousWispr still works for you.
Juno's site states a 24GB RAM requirement. We publish no RAM minimum for EnviousWispr. If your Mac has 8GB or 16GB, that is not a barrier here.
Escape Recovery keeps a dictation you cancel with your keybind or a triple press, instead of discarding it instantly. Off by default; you choose to turn it on. We found no equivalent documented for Juno.
EG-1 is fine-tuned for one job, cleaning up dictation, and we publish the numbers: it builds a real list out of a spoken one 83% of the time, up from under 1%. Juno's cleanup sits inside a broader assistant pipeline that also handles rewriting and app actions, and we found no equivalent published benchmark.
Built-in filler-word removal runs before AI polish, and it is language-aware: with your language locked to German, Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian in Settings, it keeps real words like "er" and "um" instead of stripping them as English filler.
Smart Import reads your custom vocabulary straight out of Juno's own files, without changing them, and shows you every word before anything joins your library. Juno's roughly 400 built-in seed terms are not imported, only the ones you actually added.
Where does your voice go?
Both apps process your voice on your Mac by default. For a deeper dive, read on-device vs cloud dictation privacy.
Parakeet TDT: built for speed
EnviousWispr uses NVIDIA Parakeet TDT v3, a multilingual ASR model covering 25 European languages that runs natively on the Apple Neural Engine. No network dependency, no server queues.
Based on production data from Apple Silicon Macs. Results vary by hardware and settings. Juno does not publish comparable latency figures.
A dictation tool, and a voice assistant
The two projects are aimed at slightly different jobs, and the requirements each one asks of your Mac reflect that.
Juno's stated 24GB RAM and M2-or-newer requirement is not an arbitrary line. Its pipeline runs cleanup, rewriting, and voice-command interpretation for app actions, all locally, which is a heavier local workload than transcription and cleanup alone.
EnviousWispr is built around one job: turning your speech into clean, finished text wherever your cursor is. That narrower scope is why it runs comfortably on an M1 with no published RAM floor. Neither approach is wrong; they are optimized for different things.
Juno is a local voice layer for writing, rewriting, and taking actions. After dictation begins, Voice Actions for creating a Note, setting a Reminder, or adding a one-shot alarm start with "Hey Juno." Its separate Voice Commands and Writer commands can rewrite text without a wake phrase.
EnviousWispr does not create Notes, Reminders, or alarms. It turns speech into text and pastes it where you were working. If you want a broader local assistant, Juno covers ground we do not.
Choose Juno if any of this matters more to you
Juno does real things EnviousWispr does not, on the hardware it supports. It may be the better fit here:
Creating a Note, Reminder, or alarm during dictation is a real capability EnviousWispr does not have. Start those Voice Actions with "Hey Juno" after dictation begins.
Selecting text and asking Juno to make it "warmer" or turn it into "shorter bullets" is a feature we do not offer. Our polish cleans up what you just dictated; it does not rewrite text you select afterward on command.
Juno is MIT licensed, which lets anyone fold the code into a closed-source or commercial product without releasing their changes. EnviousWispr's GPLv3 is copyleft: derivative works you distribute must also be open under GPLv3.
If you are running an M2 or later with 24GB of RAM or more, Juno's hardware requirement is not a barrier for you at all, and its broader feature set may be worth the newer bar it sets.
If you want voice-triggered Notes and Reminders, or rewriting selected text by spoken command, and your Mac meets Juno's requirements, Juno is a strong pick. If you want dictation that runs on an M1 with no RAM minimum, give EnviousWispr a try. You can always use both.
Common questions
Yes. Both EnviousWispr and Juno are completely free, with no subscription, no usage cap, and no account required. Both are also open source: EnviousWispr under GPLv3, Juno under MIT.
This is the biggest practical difference. Juno's own site states it needs an M2 or newer Apple Silicon Mac, macOS 15 Sequoia or later, and at least 24GB of RAM. EnviousWispr runs on any Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later) on macOS 14 Sonoma or later, with no published RAM minimum. If you own an M1 Mac, or a Mac with 16GB of RAM, or you have not updated to macOS 15, EnviousWispr works there and Juno's own stated requirements say it will not.
Something more. Juno can create Notes, Reminders, and one-shot alarms from Voice Actions after you say Hey Juno. Its separate Voice Commands for rewriting text do not need a wake phrase while dictating. It can also learn from clear corrections, expand snippets, and apply a different Style per app. EnviousWispr focuses on turning speech into clean text wherever your cursor is.
Yes, and like EG-1, it runs on-device with no prompt for you to write. Opening Juno's own model manager shows the pieces: Whisper Large V3 Turbo transcribes, a small Qwen3 0.6B model handles live correction as you speak, and a larger Qwen3 4B Instruct model does smart formatting afterward, both separate downloads from transcription itself. The main difference is scope: EG-1 is purpose-built for cleaning up dictation and its performance is something we measure and publish. Juno's cleanup is part of a broader voice-assistant pipeline that also handles rewriting and app actions, and we found no published benchmark for it.
Yes. After the one-time model download, transcription runs entirely on-device with no internet required. AI polish can also run offline using EG-1 (our own model, macOS 14+), Apple Intelligence (macOS 26+), or Ollama with a local model. Cloud providers like OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini are optional and require your own API key.
Yes, though under a different license. EnviousWispr is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 (GPLv3), a copyleft license: a distributed derivative must also be open under GPLv3. Juno is licensed under the MIT license, a more permissive license that lets anyone fold the code into a closed-source or commercial product. Both are genuinely open source.
Yes. EnviousWispr's Smart Import reads your custom vocabulary directly out of Juno, without changing Juno's own files, and shows you every word it found before anything joins your library. Juno ships with roughly 400 built-in terms of its own; only the words you added are imported, so your list stays yours. It also imports from Wispr Flow, Superwhisper, FluidVoice, Handy, TypeWhisper, Spokenly, and Vox.
No, per Juno's own stated requirements: M2 or newer only. EnviousWispr supports every Apple Silicon Mac starting with the original M1.
We found no documentation of a recovery or undo feature for a cancelled Juno dictation. EnviousWispr has Escape Recovery, an opt-in feature that can keep a dictation you cancel with your keybind or a triple press instead of discarding it instantly, and offers an Undo button afterward.
Yes. Download EnviousWispr, set your keybind, and Smart Import can bring your Juno custom words across in one pass. There is no other data to migrate for dictation purposes, though Juno's Notes, Reminders, and alarm actions have no equivalent in EnviousWispr, since we are a dictation tool rather than a voice assistant. Both apps work in any text field on macOS.
Free and open source. Runs on the Mac you already have.
Free to download. No account required. Works on Apple Silicon from the M1, no RAM minimum.