Free voice input with no limits: myth or reality

Potok transcribes Russian speech; this site has been translated into English for convenience.

In fact it is almost always a myth: most free programs have a hidden limit, from 30 minutes a month at SpeakFlow and Diktuy to a one-time 5-minute test at Voisty. Only Molvi is truly free without restrictions: a local program with no account and no payment. Potok (potok.now) gives 2500 words per week free, and after that a paid plan applies.

“Free and with no limits” is a phrase that often appears in ads for voice input programs, but anything can hide behind it: a one-time trial period, a limit in minutes or words per week, or a truly free product with no restrictions. Next: what these wordings mean for specific programs and how to check them yourself on the official price pages.

Words that appear in program descriptions

• Free forever: the plan has no end date, but almost always with a fixed limit: for SpeakFlow and Diktuy it is 30 minutes of dictation per month, for Talkpad 2500 words per week on desktop and 1500 on mobile.
• Trial period: access to paid features for a limited time, after which it disappears without payment: for WhisperU it is 7 days, for Talkpad fourteen days of Pro on top of the permanent free limit.
• One-time test: not a trial period but a fixed amount for a single quality check that does not renew: for Voisty it is five minutes of transcription.
• Limit per week or per month: an amount of words or minutes that resets on a schedule: for v2txt the Start plan gives 2000 words per week, for Lispr 60 minutes per week free, and key features such as history and the dictionary stay free with no time limit.
• Donation model: the program is technically free with no limit, and the developer lives on voluntary donations: this is how Molvi works, where payment is explicitly not tied to features.
• Local recognition: voice processing happens on the user's device, not on the company's server: this lowers the developer's costs and makes a truly free plan with no limit more realistic, as with Molvi, Voisty and WhisperU.
• Regional price: the amount in dollars or euros may differ from country to country: for Lispr the annual subscription costs differently depending on regional discounts, and the final price from Russia may not match the price on the website.
• Lifetime license: a one-time payment instead of a subscription, after which access is not limited in time: for Voisty it is a separate Lifetime plan, for WhisperU a purchase of a license forever; both have a fixed one-time price instead of a monthly charge.
• Payment by a Russian card directly: the amount is charged straight in rubles without conversion and without the risk of a foreign bank refusing: this is how payment works at SpeakFlow, Diktuy and v2txt, while for most foreign programs the payment goes in dollars or euros.

How to check manufacturers' promises

The promise “free with no limits” should be checked on the manufacturer's official price page, not on an advertising banner or in reviews: the wording there is more honest, because it is what determines what the user gets in practice.

The first step is to find the exact figure of the limit, not the general word “free”. If the plans page says just “free plan” with no numbers, that is a reason to be wary: most likely there is a limit, but it is not put in the foreground so as not to scare people off.

The second step is to tell a trial period from a permanent free plan. A trial period sooner or later ends and requires payment to keep working; a permanent limit has no end date but resets on a schedule, per week or per month, and is not about unlimited use in itself.

The third step is to look at where exactly speech recognition happens. Programs that process the voice right on the user's device, rather than sending it to the company's server, spend less money on infrastructure, and it is easier for them to keep an honestly free plan with no hidden limits than for cloud services that pay for every minute of recognition on their servers.

The fourth step is to check the payment method from Russia specifically: rubles directly, dollars through foreign processing, or a donation with no fixed amount are different scenarios, and the promise “free” does not cancel the question of what happens if the limit is not enough and you have to pay. These four steps take a couple of minutes but save you the disappointment of finding that “free” turned out in practice to be a limit of five minutes a month. How these criteria apply to the Russian language specifically is covered in the article voice input for Russian speech.

What Potok cannot do

Potok has limits of its own, and some of them are the exact opposite of the topic of the article: it has a free limit too, 2500 words per week on one device, and after that you need a paid plan. It has no offline mode at all: Potok is a cloud service, recognition runs on servers in Russia, and it does not work without an internet connection, unlike Molvi or Voisty, which process the voice locally and do not depend on the network.

Potok also has no apps for Android and iPhone, although some programs in the overview work on a phone. Potok does not do voice commands, voice editing of text, file transcription or translation between languages: it is pure dictation into the active field on Windows, macOS and Linux, with no extra features around recording. Other options are in the section on voice input programs.

Frequently asked questions

Built-in dictation and Potok

Primary sources: speakflow.ru · speakflow.ru · speakflow.ru · blog.speakflow.ru