What leaves my device, and when?
Your voice and text stay on your computer unless you choose a cloud provider; the app's few plain requests carry nothing you said, and Offline Lock stops them.
Your voice and the text it becomes never leave your computer. Speech recognition runs on your own machine, and there is no account, no telemetry and no analytics inside the app.
Dictate Safe does make a few network requests, and none of them carry your audio or your words. Here is every one, so you can check the list against what you see, and one switch that stops them all.
#Every request the app can make
Downloading a model
When you press Download on the AI Models page, the model file is fetched from huggingface.co, the public site the models are published on. It is a plain file download, and it happens only when you ask for it.
Your license, when you activate it
Signing in, or entering your license key, contacts our website once. What is sent: the sign-in code, or your license key and email; a random identifier for this computer; the computer’s name; and whether it is a Mac or a PC, so the Devices page of your dashboard can tell your computers apart. What is not: anything you dictated, what you type, or which apps you use. After that, the license is checked on your computer with no connection at all.
Checking for an update
When the app opens, and about once a day while it stays open, it asks our website whether a newer version exists. The request carries a version number and nothing else. You can switch it off in Settings → Privacy.
The prompt library, when you ask for it
Pressing Get the library or Check for new prompts downloads the library and its pictures from our website. When you ask for the prompt library, the app sends a one-way code of this computer’s id, so our website can count free Library saves (up to 10 per computer) and limit requests. A licensed copy also sends its license to download the full library. Nothing you wrote is sent. Searching the Library happens on your computer: the Library uses the internet when you press Get the library or Check for new prompts, and, without a license, when you save one of its prompts.
A cloud provider, only if you choose one
If you add your own API key and choose a provider on the AI Models page, requests go directly to that provider: api.groq.com or api.openai.com. This is the one case where what you said leaves the computer. It is off by default, and the badge at the top of the sidebar always says which mode you are in.
- Local: nothing leaves. This is the default.
- Hybrid: cloud cleanup is on. Your voice stays on your computer; the finished text is sent to the provider you chose, with your Vocabulary list.
- Cloud: cloud speech is on. Your recordings are sent to the provider you chose, with your Vocabulary list.
Dictate Safe never uploads a backup. It writes the file to the folder you chose and nowhere else. If that folder is kept in sync by iCloud Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive or Dropbox, that service uploads the file, locked with your passphrase unless you chose none. See what a backup is, and where it goes.
#Switching every connection off
Offline Lock, in Settings → Privacy, refuses every one of the requests above, including ours. Dictation, cleanup on your computer, History, notes and your prompts all keep working.
#Checking it yourself
You do not have to take our word for any of this. The test takes ten seconds.
- Turn off Wi-Fi entirely.
- Dictate as normal.
Your words are transcribed and typed exactly as before. Nothing is queued, nothing fails, and nothing is waiting to be sent when you reconnect.
If you would rather watch the traffic than remove it, a tool like Little Snitch or Wireshark shows the destinations above and nothing else. With on-device AI cleanup switched on, it also shows the app talking to 127.0.0.1: that is Dictate Safe talking to its own cleanup model on your computer, and it never leaves the machine.
Turning on a cloud provider does send data to that provider. We have no way to make that private, and we do not claim to. What we do is keep it off by default, show which mode you are in, and never route it through a server of ours.
While the update check is on, our website sees that some copy of the app asked for a version number, from some network address.