Tam

Separate the two claims, because they are not the same product decision and only one of them is about quality.

"On device" is a privacy and offline property. It tells you the audio does not leave the machine. It says nothing at all about accuracy — a small local model can be worse than a large hosted one, and often is.

Accuracy comes from which model, at what size, and that is the number worth asking about. Tools built on a Whisper-family model at a decent size are noticeably better at continuous speech than the OS dictation you have already rejected, mostly because they transcribe a whole utterance with context rather than committing word by word. That is also exactly why the ends of your sentences survive.

So the honest answer to question 1 is: yes, usually better, but for a reason that has nothing to do with being local.

Roughly, yes — and that is not automatically bad. The system engine has improved a lot in recent releases, and a large part of what made built-in dictation miserable was never the recognition. It was the interaction: a dictation mode you enter, a timeout that ends it, and no clean way to put the result where you were typing.

A hotkey that captures until you release, then pastes into the focused field, fixes the workflow without touching the model. For some people that is the entire problem solved. For you, with the vocabulary issue, probably not — that one is the model.

"Does the description say what it does not do" is the one I did not have and it is immediately obvious once you say it. Every tool I have regretted had a page where everything was a strength.

Adding it.