Private by architecture
Dictation that has nowhere to send your voice.
Not a promise in a privacy policy. An absence in the app: there is no code in DeftNib that can transmit your audio or your text. It transcribes and cleans up on your Mac, on the engine Apple ships with it, and it works exactly the same with Wi‑Fi off.
This is the case. The policy, word for word, is at deftnib.com/privacy.
Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.
By downloading you agree to the Terms and the Privacy Policy.
Your Mac
Everything that matters stays hereShould we move the meeting to Thursday?
Pasted where your cursor was. Job done, on this side of the line.
- Audio
- Text
- History
- Dictionary
- Snippets
- When and where you dictate
The internet
Four kinds of calls, listed. Never a word you said.
- License activation. Your key (which carries the email you bought with), an opaque id of the Mac, and its model name.
- Monthly renewal. Your key and the same opaque id. If it fails, you stay on Pro.
- Update check. The version you run and the Sparkle version, so it can offer the next one.
- Free plan counter. A hashed id and one number: words used this week.
- Your audioNever leaves
- Your textNever leaves
What does leave
Four kinds of calls to our servers. Here is each one.
4 kinds of calls to our servers: license activation, its monthly renewal, the update check, and the free plan's weekly counter, once per session, when the app starts or as soon as it gets online. Never your voice, never your text. Apart from that, your Mac downloads Apple's speech models, and the installer when you accept an update.
- 1
License activation
Once per Mac, when you paste your key.
Carries: Your key (which carries the email you bought with), an opaque id of the Mac, and its model name.
Pro only - 2
Monthly renewal
Once a month, in the background.
Carries: Your key and the same opaque id. If it fails, you stay on Pro.
Pro only - 3
Update check
When the app starts and once a day, through Sparkle.
Carries: The version you run and the Sparkle version, so it can offer the next one.
Free and Pro - 4
Free plan counter
Once per session, free plan only.
Carries: A hashed id and one number: words used this week.
Free plan only
Also on the wire, and not ours
- Apple's speech models. Downloaded from Apple when you add a language, or when the setup assistant installs your first one.
- The Apple Intelligence model. Downloaded by macOS itself when you turn Apple Intelligence on. Not something the app controls.
- The installer of an update. Downloaded from our download host when you accept an update, and only then.
None of them can carry your audio or your text: they only come in.
We would rather enumerate than deny. Saying "no server" would be a lie: there is one, and its only job is counting which Macs are on a license. An activated Mac checks its license locally, with cryptography, and stays on Pro even if that server goes silent forever.
What never leaves
Everything you would actually worry about.
Your audio
Transcribed on your Mac by the speech engine Apple ships with it. It is never stored and never sent.
Your text
Cleaned up by 15 rule engines and, when they cannot prove a sentence clean, by the language model inside macOS. On the device, always.
What you were writing
The app never reads other windows or other documents, and never takes screenshots. It reads four things through Accessibility, listed below, and stores none of them.
When, or in which app
On Pro nothing about your usage is sent. On the free plan, one weekly word count travels with a hashed id, never when or where you dictated. Which app you dictated into is kept only in your local history, and only if you turn history on.
Your history, dictionary and snippets
Files in your user folder. History is off by default. There is no copy of any of it on our side, so there is nothing to request or delete.
Your name, and your Mac's name
There is no account and no profile. On Pro, the only thing that identifies you is the email on your invoice, and it is never tied to anything you dictate. Your Mac's hardware id never travels raw, and the name you gave your Mac never travels at all: the server sees a model and an opaque id, hashed with your license as the salt.
What the app reads on your Mac
We read the minimum, and we tell you exactly what.
An app that pastes text where your cursor is has to look at a few things. These are all of them. None is stored, none leaves your Mac, and the app never logs keystrokes or takes screenshots.
Read 1 of 4
Which app is active, to know where the text goes and to apply that app's profile.
Read 2 of 4
Up to 3 characters before the cursor when it inserts, to get spacing and capitalization right.
Read 3 of 4
For 45 seconds after a dictation, the exact span it just wrote, to notice if you corrected a word. You can switch this off in Settings.
Read 4 of 4
What you have selected, once, only when you use Add selection to dictionary.
In apps that cannot hand over a range, reads 2 and 3 fall back to the field you are typing in, never a document over 20,000 characters, keep the piece they need and throw the rest away. Nothing read this way is stored or logged.
The same four, in the same words, in the privacy policy. Precision is the point: a policy you can check against the app's behavior is worth more than a promise you cannot.
The other architecture
How cloud dictation works, and why that matters.
Many dictation apps record your voice, upload it, transcribe it on their servers and often pass it to a third party model to clean it up. That is not a flaw, it is their design, and for many people it is fine. But it means your words exist, at least for a while, on machines you do not control, under a policy that can change.
| Cloud dictation, typically | DeftNib | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your voice is processed | Their servers | Your Mac |
| Dictate with Wi‑Fi off | No | Yes, all day |
| Who can read what you said | Them, and their AI providers | Nobody. It never reaches us |
| Account required | Yes, email and login | None |
| What a breach on their side exposes | Your dictations | No dictations: none are here. Purchase emails and license keys, as the privacy policy says |
| Confidentiality rests on | A privacy policy, and your trust in it | Architecture, not a promise |
The cloud column describes how cloud dictation apps say they work, in their own documentation. It is not a benchmark and it names nobody.
A policy is not the same as an absence
A privacy policy describes what a company intends to do with your words today. It can change, it has exceptions, and it depends on people you have never met keeping to it, every day, under pressure.
DeftNib cannot see your dictations, not because it promises not to, but because it does not have the code to. The most private data is the data that never existed anywhere else.
For companies
Buying for a team? Bring this to the review.
For your security team
The security review, already answered.
Dictation itself makes no network calls: audio and text are processed on each person's Mac and never transmitted. The app talks to our servers for four things, all about the license and updates, and every one is listed with what it carries. There is no dictation data on our side to put in a data processing agreement, because none reaches us.
What our server knows
- One Mac model, one activation date and the date of its last monthly renewal, per seat
- An opaque id per Mac: the hardware id hashed with your license as the salt
- Which seats were freed, and when
- The buyer's email and company, from the invoice
What it never knows
- A single word anyone dictated, as audio or as text
- When anyone dictated, how much, or in which app
- Who sits at which seat: the team page shows a seat number and a Mac model, and nothing else
- Anything that carries audio or text: dictation itself makes no network calls
Team packs from 5 to 50 seats, bought once, with one admin key and one invoice. Team licenses.
Try it with your own voice. It is the only thing that convinces.
Download it, install it, talk. No account, no email, no card, and nothing you say leaves your Mac. If a week later you are not using it, you lost nothing. If you are using it every day, that is when Pro starts making sense.
Mac with Apple Silicon and macOS 26 or later. Free up to 4,000 words a week, no account.
By downloading you agree to the Terms and the Privacy Policy.