Where your voice goes when you dictate with FnScribe
Short answer: nowhere, unless you send it. The default path starts at your microphone and ends at your cursor, on the same Mac.
Dictation apps ask for a lot of trust. You’re handing them a microphone and whatever you say into it: emails, notes, names, half-formed ideas. So before FnScribe goes on sale, here’s exactly where each piece goes. FnScribe isn’t available yet, so this describes how the app is built to work.
The default: nothing leaves the Mac
When you hold fn and speak, the audio goes to whisper.cpp, a speech recognition engine that runs on Apple Silicon. It turns your voice into text on the Mac itself. The text pastes where your cursor is, and the audio is discarded.
On that path:
- Your audio is not uploaded. There’s no server of ours for it to go to.
- There is no FnScribe account. Nothing to sign in to, and no password we could leak or reset.
- It works offline. Local dictation doesn’t need a network connection at all.
A new Mac starts this way. Cloud speech recognition and AI cleanup are both off until you turn them on.
When you choose to send something
FnScribe has two optional features that use a cloud service. Both run on an API key you bring from OpenRouter, Groq, or OpenAI. FnScribe doesn’t have an account with the provider. You do.
Cloud speech recognition
If you turn this on, the audio for that dictation goes to the provider you picked instead of to whisper.cpp. The request goes straight from your Mac to them. We don’t sit in the middle of it.
AI cleanup
Cleanup is a separate pass after recognition. It tidies the text into a style like Prompt, Code, or German. It sends text, not audio. If “skip when already clean” is on, a sentence that doesn’t need a pass isn’t sent at all.
What stays on the Mac regardless
- History is your last ten dictations, stored on the Mac so you can paste one again with ⌃⌥V. When an eleventh arrives, the oldest is dropped. It isn’t archived anywhere else.
- Your word list lives with the rest of your settings, on the Mac.
- Your stats (words this week, speaking pace, minutes saved) are worked out and shown on the Mac. They aren’t a chart we keep.
What never leaves at all
Your API key. It stays on the Mac, and when you export your settings to move them to another Mac, the file leaves the key out. If you lose a key, the provider that issued it can give you a new one. We never had a copy.
The short version
- Hold, speak, let go: recognized on your Mac, pasted at your cursor, audio discarded.
- Cloud speech: off by default. On, that dictation’s audio goes to your provider on your key.
- Cleanup: off by default. On, text (never audio) goes to your provider on your key.
- History, word list, stats and your key stay on the Mac.
The full details are in the privacy notice. You can also try the whole flow, including the settings switches, in the demo on the homepage.