Privacy architecture

Audio

• Captured only while your hotkey is held, at 16 kHz mono, into memory.
• Never written to disk — there is no audio file to find, recover, or leak.
• Discarded as soon as text exists.
• Never transmitted. There is no setting that causes audio to leave your Mac, because no code path exists to send it.

What is written to disk

Everything lives under your own user account, in ~/Library/Application Support/OpenVoiceFlow/:

File	Contents
settings.json	Your preferences. No secrets.
dictionary.json	Your personal dictionary.
snippets.json	Your snippets.
styles.json	Your per-app style map.
profile.json	Your Know-Me profile.
History and stats files	Recent transcripts (most recent 500), word counts, per-app and per-day totals, and your first-ever transcript.

Speech models are cached separately at ~/Documents/huggingface/models/argmaxinc/whisperkit-coreml/. API keys are in the macOS Keychain, service app.openvoiceflow.apikeys — never in any file above.

Every outbound connection

The app makes exactly three kinds of network request, and you can reason about all of them:

Request	When	Contains
Model download	The first time you select a given Whisper model	Nothing about you — it is a public model file fetch.
Update check	Daily, and at launch, if automatic updates are on	A request for the signed appcast at openvoiceflow.com. No account, no identifier.
Cleanup request	Per dictation, only if you enabled a cloud backend	Transcript text, cleanup instruction, style, and your dictionary/profile context. Never audio.

Set cleanup to None (the default) or Ollama, and the third row never happens. Turn off automatic updates and the second stops too.

What is never collected

• No telemetry or analytics in the app. No usage pings, crash reports, or feature counters.
• No account. Nothing to sign up for, so nothing to profile.
• No OpenVoiceFlow servers. There is no backend that could hold your data — this website is a static site.
• No screen reading. Accessibility permission is used only to send a paste keystroke.
• No keystroke logging. Input Monitoring watches for one key; everything else passes straight through.

Verifying this yourself

Two checks anyone can run:

• Airplane mode. Turn off Wi-Fi with cleanup set to None and dictate. It works, because nothing in that path needs a network.
• Network monitor. Run Little Snitch or similar and watch. With cleanup off, dictation generates no connections at all.

OpenVoiceFlow is MIT-licensed open source, so every claim here is checkable in the code itself rather than taken on trust. If anything on this page does not match what the app does, that is a bug — tell us at shimoverse@gmail.com.