How do I stop the app connecting to anything?
Turn on Offline Lock in Settings, Privacy, the menu bar icon or the sidebar card, and every connection is refused, ours included, while dictation keeps working.
Turn on Offline Lock. While it is on, Dictate Safe makes no connection at all: no update check, no model download, no prompt library, no sign-in, and no cloud speech or cleanup even if you have a key saved. Dictation carries on as normal.
#Turn it on
It is the same switch in three places:
- Settings → Privacy: turn on Stop this app connecting to anything.
- The menu under the Dictate Safe icon in the menu bar: tick Offline Lock.
- The card at the bottom of the sidebar, which shows the state on every page of the app.
The Dictate page reads No connections, and the sidebar card shows the lock closed.
#If you were using a cloud provider
Dictate Safe asks first. Turning the lock on moves dictation, or cleanup, to the model on your computer, so what the screen says always matches what is running. Your API key stays saved, so switching back is one click once the lock is off.
#What still works
Everything that happens on your computer: dictating, on-device cleanup, History, Scratchpad, Import, Vocabulary, Snippets, your prompts and Keep Awake. Anything that needs a connection says so in plain words instead of failing quietly.
With the lock on, Dictate Safe cannot see whether a new version exists. After thirty days it tells you so, once, and leaves the choice with you. To update, turn the lock off, update, and turn it back on.
To download a speech model, sign in, or get the prompt library, turn the lock off first. A model you already downloaded keeps working with the lock on.