Privacy & network use

Dictation

When you hold the activation key, Dictate records from your microphone into memory. When you release it, the audio is transcribed on your Mac by NVIDIA's Parakeet model running on the Neural Engine, and the text is pasted at your cursor. The audio is then discarded; it is never written to disk and never sent anywhere. The pasted text also remains on your clipboard, like anything you copy.

Every network connection

• first launch

  Speech model download from huggingface.co (about 600 MB), once. Repeated only if the model is missing or a new version of Dictate ships a new model.

• daily

  Update check to dictate.cphtech.dk, and the download when you accept an update. The request carries the app version, whether Dictate is in its trial, past it or licensed, and how many trial days you've used and how many days ago you first opened it — so we can count installs — and which kind of link you downloaded it from (a directory, Reddit, a review, another site, or ours), so we know which ones work. Plus your IP address, which isn't stored. No audio, text, settings, license key, email or anything that identifies your Mac.

• earlier versions

  AI cleanup, in Dictate 1.10.0 and earlier only; the release after 1.10.0 removes it. Off by default: if you turn it on in one of those versions, dictations are sent to an LLM provider (Anthropic), through your own login, to fix punctuation and filler words. After updating, it is off and nothing you dictate leaves your Mac.

• invited testers

  Dictate Labs, by invitation only. If you join and turn on an experiment that sends text, Dictate asks first, and then sends only the takes that experiment names to an LLM provider (Anthropic), through your own login. Your voice never leaves your Mac, and nothing changes for anyone who hasn't joined.

• never

  Tracking identifiers, crash reporting, accounts, or uploading audio. Dictate never asks a server whether you may dictate: your license and trial are checked on your Mac, and work with the network off.

What is stored on your Mac

• Your settings: activation keys, per-keyboard keys, substitutions, filler removal.
• The speech model files.
• In your macOS Keychain: the trial counter — the date you first opened Dictate and how many days you have dictated — and, once you buy, your license key (it contains the email address you bought with). The key is also kept in Dictate's preferences, so it can't be lost if the Keychain is locked.
• In Dictate's preferences: which kind of link you downloaded it from, read once on first launch from the download record macOS keeps for every downloaded app.
• Standard macOS system logs, which stay on your Mac.

Permissions it asks for

• Microphone — to hear you while you hold the key. Dictate does not listen otherwise.
• Accessibility — to detect the activation key and paste text into the app you're using.

On Windows

Dictate for Windows (“Offline Dictation” in the Microsoft Store) follows the same rules, with fewer connections:

• dictation

  Never. Audio is held in memory while you hold the key, transcribed on your PC by the same Parakeet model, then discarded; it is never written to disk.

• model

  No download. The speech model is part of the Store package.

• updates

  No update check. The Microsoft Store installs updates; Dictate itself asks no server for anything.

• earlier versions

  AI cleanup, in 1.0.1 and earlier only; the release after 1.0.1 removes it. Off by default, and works as on the Mac, through your own login.

Stored on your PC: your settings and a log of timings and errors (never what you said) in the app's own data folder, which uninstalling removes; and, in Windows Credential Manager, the trial counter and your licence key, which stay after an uninstall so a reinstall keeps them. The pasted text is marked so it stays out of Windows clipboard history and cloud clipboard sync. Dictate asks for the microphone, which you can turn off under Settings → Privacy & security → Microphone.

Buying Dictate

Buying happens in your browser, not in the app. Checkout is run by Stripe, which sells Dictate on our behalf through Link as the merchant of record: it processes your payment and billing details under its own privacy policy, sends your receipt, handles sales tax and VAT, and shares with us what we need to support you: your email address, country and order. After paying you land on license.offlinedictation.app, which asks Stripe whether the order is paid and shows your license key. That key is signed, so Dictate can check it on your Mac without going online.

This website

offlinedictation.app runs no scripts in your browser, and unless you came here from one of our ads it sets no cookies and stores nothing. Its download and checkout links carry where you came from, a tag on the link that brought you here or the name of the site that did, so downloads and orders can be counted per source, and it counts each arrival by that source. That's all it records about a visit: a count per source and day, with no IP address and nothing that identifies you. It is served by Cloudflare, which processes requests (including IP addresses) to deliver and protect the site.

If you arrive from one of our Google ads, and you are outside the EU, the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, the site keeps the ad click's id in one cookie for 90 days. With that id we keep, also for 90 days, what Google told us about the click: the search phrase, whether it was a computer or a phone, Mac or Windows, the country, and the page you landed on. If you then download or buy Dictate in the same browser, we tell Google that its ad led to a download or a sale, and the amount, so we can see which ads work. Google learns nothing else from us: no email address, no license key, and nothing from the app, which never knows about any of this.

Who we are

Dictate is made by cphtech in Denmark.