Your voice stays on your Mac
Speech recognition runs on your Mac, using a speech model you download once. Your voice is never uploaded, by us or by anyone else. The same is true of the text it produces, unless you choose to connect an online AI service yourself (see "Optional online AI services" below).
What Voice Tide keeps on your Mac
- Recent dictations. By default, History keeps your last 5 dictations: the text and a recording of each, so you can play one back or run it again. You can keep fewer, more or none, keep them for a set time, save the ones you want, or delete any of them at any time.
- Words you teach it. When you correct a word, Voice Tide remembers the pair so it gets it right next time. You can see and delete them on the Words page.
- Dictation statistics for the Insights page: how many dictations, how long, and how many words, never the words themselves. You can clear them there.
- Meetings, if you use them. Recording a meeting keeps its audio on your Mac for 14 days by default (you can change this), and saves the transcript as a file on your Mac, in a folder you can choose.
- Your settings, the models and voices you download, and a troubleshooting log that leaves out the text you dictate.
All of this lives in Voice Tide's own folder on your Mac, ~/Library/Containers/ai.voicetide.mac, apart from meeting transcripts saved to a folder you picked. It stays there until you delete it. To remove everything, quit Voice Tide and move that folder to the Trash.
When Voice Tide goes online
Only to download something you asked for:
- speech models, from Hugging Face (huggingface.co), or from the mirror blob.handy.computer if a Hugging Face download fails;
- the translation model, from Hugging Face;
- the natural voices for read aloud, from GitHub (github.com).
These are ordinary downloads. Like any website, the server you download from sees your internet address; nothing about you or your dictations is sent. Every file is checked against a fingerprint before it is used.
Optional online AI services
Voice Tide has an experimental feature, off by default, that can tidy up text using an online AI service with your own account key. If you turn it on and choose such a service, the text of your dictations is sent to that service and handled under its own privacy policy. It never includes your voice. The on-device choices, Apple Intelligence and the built-in translation, keep your text on your Mac.
Permissions
- Microphone, to hear you while you hold the key.
- Accessibility, to notice the key you hold and to type the text into the app you're using.
- System audio recording, only if you record a meeting, so the transcript includes the other side of the call.
Voice Tide never asks for your camera, your screen, your contacts, your location or your photos.
Purchases
If you buy Voice Tide or anything in it, Apple handles the payment through the App Store. We never see or store your payment details.
Children
Voice Tide does not knowingly collect information from anyone, including children, because it collects no information from anyone.
Changes to this policy
If this ever changes, this page will say so, with a new "last updated" date above.
Questions about privacy?