Privacy statement

Last updated 2026-09-28

Owscribe turns your speech into text on your Mac. Recognition runs entirely on your Mac: your voice, your words, and what's on your screen are never sent to us or to anyone else. There are no accounts, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no ads.

What Owscribe records and keeps

• Your voice, only while you hold the dictation shortcut. A recording stops when you release the shortcut, after ten minutes, when your Mac sleeps or locks, or when the microphone changes.
• Dictations. Each dictation's recording and transcript are saved on your Mac, with when it happened, how long it was, the outcome (for example "Pasted"), the name of the app you dictated into, and, if one applied, the project's name and whether you chose it or Owscribe detected it. They stay until you delete them, one at a time in Dictations or all at once with Settings → Storage & Privacy → Clear History.
• Microphone tests and practice use temporary audio that is discarded, never saved to Dictations.
• Voice calibration, if you run it, keeps only a few numbers per microphone (background noise level and the range of your voice's loudness and pitch), never the audio.
• Your settings: your shortcut, your vocabulary and projects, and when and in which app each project was last detected.

All of this lives in Owscribe's own storage on your Mac, which other apps can't read: ~/Library/Containers/app.owlive.owscribe.Owscribe. Deleting that folder, with Owscribe quit, removes everything Owscribe has stored.

What Owscribe reads from other apps

Owscribe works without reading anything from other apps: it records, transcribes, and lets you copy the text. With the Accessibility permission, which you can grant or revoke in System Settings at any time, it can also:

• Paste into the field you were in. It checks that the same text field is still focused and editable, never a password field, then pastes. To paste, it places the text on the clipboard for a moment and puts your previous clipboard back if nothing else changed it meanwhile. It never presses Return.
• Detect the project (on by default, but it reads nothing until you add a project; Projects → While you dictate): it reads the title of the window you're dictating into, the document, folder, or web address that window shows, and, for apps that show an open project (such as Codex and Claude), that project's name. It uses them to choose which project's vocabulary helps recognition.
• Use text near the cursor (off by default for new installs; Projects → While you dictate): it reads up to 500 characters before the cursor, up to 200 selected, and up to 150 after, so names and spelling match what you're writing.

What it reads for context is used for that one dictation, in memory, and is never saved or sent anywhere; Dictations records only the app's name, the project's name, and whether nearby text was used. Owscribe never reads text from password fields, password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, Keychain Access, Passwords), or terminal apps (Terminal, iTerm). Outside a dictation it reads nothing from other apps, with two exceptions: when you press Check Now on a project, it reads the last window you used, once; and when you switch to an app, it asks that app to turn on its accessibility support, because some apps (Chrome and apps built like it) only make their text fields available once asked. That request reads no content.

Choosing a project from the menu bar needs no permission and reads nothing.

Files you choose

When you add a folder to a project, Owscribe keeps only the folder's path, to recognise windows that show a document inside it. It doesn't read, index, or change the folder's contents.

Network

Owscribe connects to the internet only to:

• Download the speech model (about 2.5 GB), once, when you set it up, from Owscribe's download server at owlive.app.
• Check for updates, which asks the same server whether a newer version exists; the request includes your Owscribe version.

Like any web server, it records the IP address, time, and file requested for these downloads, in its host's (Cloudflare's) standard logs. We use them only to keep the service running and don't combine them with anything else. Your recordings, transcripts, settings, and anything read from other apps are never part of these requests.

Children

Owscribe isn't directed at children and doesn't knowingly collect anything from anyone; everything it keeps stays on your Mac.

Changes and contact

If this statement changes, the new version will be published here with its date, and the release notes will say what changed.

Questions: owscribe@owlive.app