Privacy Policy

Last updated October 14, 2026

Draft. This policy has not had a legal review yet and may change before spellsafe's public release.

spellsafe is a Mac app that turns your speech into text. It was built so that what you say stays on your Mac. This page explains what the app stores, what it connects to, and what it never does.

The short version

• Your voice is transcribed on your Mac. Audio and transcripts are never sent to us or to anyone else.
• spellsafe has no accounts, no analytics, no tracking and no ads.
• The app goes online only to download its speech and text models, and only when they are missing.

What stays on your Mac

Speech recognition runs locally with NVIDIA's Parakeet model on Apple's Neural Engine. The optional AI cleanup and "rewrite that" features use a small language model (Qwen3) that also runs locally. The app keeps these files on your Mac, and you can delete them at any time:

• History: each dictation's text, the app you dictated into, and its timing, in ~/Library/Application Support/SpellSafe/. This also powers the Stats page.
• Recordings: if "save recordings" is on in Settings, the audio of each dictation, in ~/Library/Logs/SpellSafe/.
• Vocabulary and settings: the words you teach it and your preferences.
• Log file: diagnostic messages in ~/Library/Logs/SpellSafe.log, which can include dictated text.

None of this is uploaded. If you choose to send us a log or a recording to report a problem, we use it only to fix that problem.

When spellsafe connects to the internet

• Model downloads. On first launch, spellsafe downloads the Parakeet speech model and, if AI cleanup is on, the Qwen3 text model, from Hugging Face. If you re-run a dictation with Parakeet v3 from History, that model is downloaded once too. These downloads send no audio or text. Hugging Face sees an ordinary download request, including your IP address, under its own privacy policy.
• Apple's speech model. If you compare a dictation with Apple's built-in SpeechAnalyzer, macOS may download its English model from Apple the first time.
• Opening websites. If you say a voice command to open a website, spellsafe hands that address to your default browser.

spellsafe does not check for updates, report crashes, or send usage statistics.

Permissions

spellsafe asks macOS for Microphone access so it can hear you, and Accessibility access so it can type into other apps and notice its shortcut keys. It listens only while you are dictating. It ignores key presses while a password field is active. Some features place text on your clipboard so it can be pasted.

This website

This site has no cookies or analytics. It loads fonts from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address under Google's privacy policy. Our web host may keep standard server logs.

Children

spellsafe is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone.

Changes

If we change how spellsafe handles data, we will update this page and the date above before the change ships.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email privacy@spellsafe.ai.