App privacy

The short version

Dictaquill has no server and no account. Your voice and your words stay on your Mac, and we receive nothing from the app.

We checked version 0.2.0 on macOS 26.6 while dictating: neither Dictaquill nor the Apple speech service it uses opened a network connection, and the app contains no code for making one.

Your voice

The microphone is on only while you hold the key, and the floating widget shows it for that whole time. The sound goes to Apple’s speech recogniser, which runs on your Mac, and is never saved to disk.

What stays on your Mac

Your dictation history: what you said, when, and for how long, so you can find it again or copy it. Kept for 90 days. Untick Keep a history of what I dictate in the dashboard to stop keeping it, delete one entry, or use Delete all history….

A diagnostic log, on unless you untick Keep a diagnostic log on this Mac: which apps you dictated into, whether the text arrived, how long it took, how speech-like each dictation sounded, and short notes when something failed. It never contains your words. Kept for 90 days, except that version 0.2.0 keeps the short notes about failures until you turn the log off; the next version deletes those after 90 days too. The detailed session log is cleared each time the app starts. Turning it off deletes it.

Your settings: your key, your language, your correction rules, where the widget sits, and running totals of words, dictations and speaking time.

All of it is in ~/Library/Application Support/Dictaquill and ~/Library/Preferences/com.aurobindogupta.Dictaquill.plist. Deleting those removes it.

The clipboard

When text cannot be typed where your cursor is, Dictaquill puts it on your clipboard so you can paste it. It marks that text as belonging to this Mac only, so it is not passed to your other Apple devices.

Password fields

Real password fields are refused: nothing is typed and nothing is saved. Some websites hide what you type in an ordinary field instead. In Chrome, Dictaquill notices afterwards and removes that dictation from your history. In Safari it cannot tell, so the dictation stays in your history until you delete it. Please do not dictate passwords.

Problem reports

Only if you make one, in the dashboard’s Feedback tab. It is saved as a file on your Desktop, and it includes the session log and, unless you untick it, your last 20 dictations. You read it and send it yourself; nothing is sent automatically.

What we receive from the app

Nothing. No analytics, no crash reports, no update check and no licence check in this version. A paid version will need a licence check and an update check; before that version ships, this page will say exactly what each one sends.

Downloading the app

The file is served by GitHub. Like any website, GitHub records your IP address and the time of the request; its privacy statement applies to that part. We see only how many times the file was downloaded. Signing up on the download page is covered by the website’s privacy page.