The one-line version
Superwhisper puts your words into the text field you were already in. Deiko puts what you pointed at, and what you said about it, into a folder you hand to an agent. One replaces typing. The other replaces explaining.
Where Superwhisper is the better tool
- You want dictation everywhere. Slack, email, commit messages, a doc — anywhere a cursor blinks. Deiko does not do this at all and is not trying to.
- You want the words themselves. Superwhisper gives you your sentence. Deiko gives you a brief built from your sentence, which is a different artifact.
- You want fully local transcription. Superwhisper runs Whisper models on-device. Deiko's cloud route is the default, with an on-device fallback that is Apple's recogniser rather than a local Whisper.
- You want model choice. Picking and swapping local models is Superwhisper's territory. Deiko deliberately has no model picker.
Where Deiko is the better tool
- The thing you are describing is on screen. Deiko crops a screenshot to whatever is under your cursor while you talk, and reads that element's accessibility label and window title. Dictation captures none of this, because it cannot see your screen.
- The output is going to an agent, not a person. What comes out is a folder — screenshots plus a written brief — that drops into Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT or Codex as one unit.
- You switch languages mid-sentence. There is no language setting to get wrong. More on that here.
- You are describing a sequence. Point, talk, point somewhere else, keep talking. The brief keeps the order.
The honest overlap
If your job is "get this thought out of my head and into a text box faster than I can type", Superwhisper is the more direct answer and you should use it. Plenty of people will want both: dictation for everything, and Deiko for the specific moment when you are pointing at a bug and would otherwise be writing four paragraphs about it.
Practical differences
- Platform. Deiko is macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon only.
- Account. Deiko has none. No email, no password, no profile.
- What leaves the Mac. Screenshots, OCR text and briefs never reach Deiko's servers. Narration audio does, to be transcribed, and it is deleted as soon as it becomes text. To file each brief in the right task, Deiko sends what you said, a one-line summary of it, your window titles (with anything that looks like a key stripped) and a few lines about your earlier tasks through its relay to a sorting model. Deiko keeps none of it. Bring your own Groq key and your audio skips our servers. Details.
- Price. Free and open source, no account, no card. Every Mac gets two hours of hosted transcription a month; past that Deiko transcribes on-device, and your own Groq key has no limit. Pro is $6.99 a month, $69 a year or $169 once, for ten hours.
- Source. All of Deiko is open source under MIT, the relay included, so every privacy line here can be checked in the code.