Pepys Dictate for Mac
Privacy
Last updated 5 October 2026
The short version
Your voice and your words stay on your Mac. Pepys Dictate has no account, no cloud transcription and no analytics on what you say. If the app ever does something not on this page, that is a bug: please tell us.
What stays on your Mac, always
- Audio. Recordings are processed on your Mac and kept for the History screen on the schedule you choose in Settings. They are never uploaded.
- Transcripts and formatted text. Both live in a local history database on your Mac.
- Your stats. Words dictated, speaking speed, typing-test result, streak and the Pepys meter are stored as counts, with no text.
- Which apps you dictate into. Used locally for per-app styles and your top-apps list.
- Your settings and personal dictionary.
- The AI models. Speech recognition and formatting run entirely on your Mac.
What leaves your Mac
| When | What is sent | To whom | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| First launch | A request for the speech model and the formatting model files | Hugging Face for the speech model (our mirror at updates.pepys.co if Hugging Face is unavailable) and updates.pepys.co for the formatting model | To download the models once. Nothing about you is included. |
| You enter a licence key | The key, your Mac's name and our organisation id | Polar, our payment provider | To activate your licence. After that it works offline. |
| Launch, when online | The same key and activation id | Polar | To confirm the licence is still valid. |
| Checking for updates | Your app version | updates.pepys.co | To find new versions. |
| Only if you opt in | An event name (“trial started”, “weekly limit reached”, “licence activated”), the app version and the macOS version | pepys.co | To see whether the product works. Off until you turn it on. Never text, audio, app names, keys or identifiers. |
That is the whole list.
What we never collect
Your audio, your text, the apps you use, your contacts, your files, your location, or any device identifier beyond the licence activation.
If you add your own AI provider
An optional advanced setting can send a transcript to an AI provider you configure yourself. It is off by default. If you turn it on, text goes to the provider you chose, under their terms, and nowhere else.
Permissions
Microphone to hear you while you dictate. Accessibility to paste into the app you are using and to read the shortcut keys. Notifications are optional, for the weekly recap.
Deleting your data
Clear History in the app, or delete the app and its folder at ~/Library/Application Support/co.pepys.dictate. Deactivating your licence in Settings frees the activation with Polar. Questions: contact@pepys.co. For the Pepys web transcription service, see our separate privacy policy.
Launch updates on this site
If you ask for a launch update on the Pepys Dictate page, we store your email address to send you one email when the app is out. We don't use it for anything else, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe.
Share links
If you share Pepys Dictate from the app, the link carries a random code that is not tied to you or your licence. When someone opens a link with a code, this site keeps that code in a cookie in their browser for 30 days, so a later purchase can be counted against it, and it counts, for each code, the visits per day and the purchases. To count a visit once, it makes a hash of the visitor from their network address and browser details using a secret key that changes every day; the address and browser details themselves are not stored, and the hash cannot be matched from one day to the next. To count purchases once per person, it stores a hash of the buyer's email address, not the address. If a friend enters a share code in the Mac app, the app can tell this site, once, that an install used that code; to count each install once, the site stores only a hash of a random install id made with a secret key, never a name, email address or network address. The counts are all anyone sees: they show how many visits, installs and purchases a code brought, never who they were.
Open-source licences
The software and AI models inside Pepys Dictate, and their licences, are listed on the open-source licences page.