Privacy

Audio never leaves this computer. The only network calls are the model download and the license check. That sentence sits in the Settings window of Dictate and it is the whole privacy story. This guide spells out what it means in practice.

Your voice stays on the device

Dictate records from the microphone only while you hold the talk key or while hands free dictation is listening. The microphone opens on the press and closes on the release. On macOS the microphone indicator in the menu bar lights while Dictate listens and goes dark when it stops. Nothing is recorded between dictations.

The audio is handed to a Whisper model that runs on your own processor. The model turns it into text and the audio is dropped. No recording is written to disk and no audio is sent to any server. Dictate has no cloud mode and no account and no telemetry.

The two network calls

Dictate talks to two hosts and to nothing else.

The first is huggingface.co where the speech models are published. Dictate downloads a model from there once when you choose it and stores the files in the Dictate folder on your computer. The download carries no information about you. After that the model loads from disk and no call is made.

The second is license.x4ops.com which is the x4ops license server. Dictate contacts it in four moments and sends these fields and nothing else. When the trial starts and about once a day during the trial it sends a hash of the machine and the trial start date and the app name and version. At activation it sends the key you typed and a hash of the machine and the app name and version. About once a day while licensed it sends a hash of the key and a hash of the machine and the app name and version. When you click Remove license it sends a hash of the key and a hash of the machine so the server frees the seat. Every call also carries a protocol version number and a random request number that the signed reply echoes.

The machine hash is derived from a hardware identifier and cannot be turned back into it. No name and no email and no transcript and no setting ever leaves the computer. Like every web server license.x4ops.com sees the internet address your computer connects from. The license routes keep that address in memory for 10 minutes to limit the number of requests per address and the hosting platform keeps it in its standard request logs. No license record stores it.

What Dictate saves on your computer

Everything lives in one folder. On macOS it is the folder named com.x4ops.dictate under Application Support in your Library folder. On Windows it is %LOCALAPPDATA%\x4ops\Dictate. The folder holds the settings with your hotkeys and model and language and vocabulary and replacements and toggles. The history with your last 100 transcripts and their times. The downloaded models. The trial record and the license file. The log file.

The history is the one place your dictated text is kept. Open History from the menu and click Clear history to empty it. The 101st dictation drops the oldest one by itself.

The log file records what Dictate did and when with the number of characters of each transcript and the time it took. It never records the text itself. Attach it to a support email when something goes wrong.

The macOS permissions

Microphone lets Dictate hear you. Accessibility lets Dictate paste the text into the app you use and listen for the hotkeys while another app has focus. Dictate uses the two permissions for those two jobs alone. It does not read the screen and does not record what you type in other apps. The hotkey listener reacts to the two hotkeys and to nothing else. Windows asks for no permission and Dictate behaves the same way there.

This website

This site is pages served by Vercel. It sets no cookies of its own and runs no analytics and loads no third party scripts. Vercel keeps the standard request logs of its platform for the pages and the downloads.

The Buy button leads to the Stripe checkout and Stripe handles your payment data under its own terms. After a payment Stripe tells the x4ops license server the order id and the email address of the buyer. The server creates the license key and emails it to that address and stores the order id and a hash of the address and never the address itself.

Contact

Questions about privacy go to support@x4ops.com.