Local Dictate Privacy Policy
Effective July 12, 2026
The short version: your voice never leaves your Mac. Local Dictate transcribes on your machine, keeps your transcripts on your machine, and has no servers, no accounts, and no analytics. The only thing it ever downloads is the speech model itself, once.
What Local Dictate collects
Nothing. Local Dictate has no accounts, no sign-in, no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, and no cloud service. The app does not transmit your voice, your transcripts, or any usage data to Greater Than Consulting or to any third party.
How your voice is handled
Audio is recorded only while you hold the Fn key (or have the mic locked on), written to a temporary file on your Mac, transcribed by an AI model running on your Mac, and then overwritten by the next recording. Audio is never uploaded and never kept. Transcripts are saved to a local history file on your Mac that only you can read, and you can delete it at any time.
The one-time model download
On first launch, Local Dictate downloads its speech-recognition model (about 1.6 GB) from Hugging Face, the standard public host for open AI models. That request fetches a file; it carries none of your data. After the download, Local Dictate works entirely offline — forever.
Why the app asks for permissions
- Microphone — to hear you while you dictate. Only active while you hold Fn or lock the mic on; macOS shows its own indicator whenever the microphone is live.
- Accessibility — to notice when you press the Fn key, to paste the finished text at your cursor, and to power the optional Learn From Corrections feature described below. Local Dictate does not log your typing.
Learning from your corrections
The optional Learn From Corrections feature works like this: for up to 90 seconds after Local Dictate pastes a transcript, it re-reads the text of that one field — only the field it just pasted into — to notice if you fix a word (for example, correcting a name it misspelled). If you do, it offers to add that correction to your personal dictionary, and nothing is added unless you click Add. This happens entirely on your Mac. The text it re-reads is compared and discarded, never stored or transmitted, and the app never reads any other window, field, or app. You can turn this off any time from the menu (“Learn From Corrections”).
Smart Paragraphs
The optional Smart Paragraphs feature uses Apple’s built-in on-device intelligence (part of macOS) to decide where paragraphs should break. Like the transcription itself, it runs entirely on your Mac.
The clipboard
To place text at your cursor, Local Dictate briefly uses the macOS clipboard, then restores whatever was on it before. Clipboard contents are never stored or transmitted.
Children’s privacy
Local Dictate does not collect data from anyone, including children.
Changes to this policy
If a future version of Local Dictate ever changes what data is handled (for example, license-key activation when the app leaves beta), this policy will be updated first and the change will be called out in the app’s release notes.
Contact
Questions about privacy or anything else: info@greaterthanconsulting.com
Greater Than Consulting · Vero Beach, Florida