Privacy Policy

Dictate is built to keep your voice and your words on your Mac. By default, everything happens on-device. We run no servers that receive your audio or text, we use no analytics, and the app does not phone home. The only time anything leaves your Mac is if you deliberately turn on an optional cloud cleanup feature and supply your own API key.

Dictate is made by Nathan Fennel. Contact: nathan@100apps.studio.

• Microphone audio. Captured only while you are actively dictating (holding the hotkey, or after a tap that locks dictation on). Speech is transcribed on-device using Apple's SpeechTranscriber and SpeechAnalyzer. Dictate never sends your audio off the device.
• Transcribed text. Inserted into the app that has focus, using the macOS Accessibility and clipboard features.
• Dictation history. The last hour of dictations is kept in memory so you can recall it with Control-Option-Command-V. It is never written to disk and clears when the app quits.
• Learning log. When enabled, Dictate stores a small file in your Application Support folder containing statistics and correction pairs (a misheard word and your fix). It never stores full transcripts. Reverting a correction removes it.
• Conversation transcripts. If you turn this on, Dictate writes speaker-labeled transcripts of your dictation sessions to local files on your Mac. They stay on your Mac.
• Accessibility. To insert text and to learn from your edits, Dictate reads the contents of the focused text field through the Accessibility API. Password and other secure text fields are never read.

Dictate can polish a transcript before inserting it. The on-device options (Apple Intelligence) keep everything local. If you choose a cloud provider (Claude, OpenAI, Google, Groq, OpenRouter, or a custom OpenAI-compatible server) and enter your own API key, then your transcribed text, and only the text, never the audio, is sent to that provider to be rewritten. That provider processes it under its own terms and privacy policy. We are not a party to that exchange and receive no copy. If a cloud request fails, the local transcript is used unchanged. Your API keys are stored in the macOS Keychain.

Nothing. Dictate has no accounts, no analytics, no telemetry, no advertising, and no crash reporting to us. We do not receive your audio, your transcripts, your corrections, or your usage. Any crash reports handled by macOS follow Apple's policies and are not sent to us unless you choose to share them.

The local data described above lives in your user Library and Keychain. Quitting the app clears the in-memory history. Deleting the app together with its Application Support folder removes everything Dictate created.

Dictate is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. We collect nothing from anyone.

We may update this policy. Material changes will be reflected here with a new effective date.

Questions about privacy: nathan@100apps.studio.