How dictation works
When you hold the talk key, Saywrite records from your microphone and passes the audio to its speech engine, which runs on your Mac. Speech-to-text uses Parakeet TDT v3 (a model from NVIDIA). When it's needed and switched on, a small language model, Gemma 4 E4B (a model from Google, 4-bit), tidies the text. Both run on your Mac using MLX. The text is then pasted into the app you're using.
Internet use
Saywrite uses the internet for one thing: downloading the speech models (about 6 GB) from huggingface.co during Voice setup. A small helper does the download. It runs outside the engine's sandbox, because it needs the network, and has Hugging Face's telemetry switched off. Hugging Face will see an ordinary download request from your internet connection, under Hugging Face's privacy policy. Nothing about you or your voice is sent.
After that, dictation needs no internet. The speech engine runs under the macOS sandbox (sandbox-exec) with all network access denied, and with its libraries' offline settings on. The Saywrite app itself contains no networking code. There is no telemetry, analytics or crash reporting, and no account.
Permissions
Microphone: only while you hold the talk key, or during the microphone check in Voice setup.
Accessibility: to notice when you hold the talk key, to paste, and to read the focused text field, your selection, the text cursor position and the window title. Saywrite uses these to pick a writing style for the app you're in and to learn from the edits you make. It doesn't use Input Monitoring.
What it reads after pasting
If “Learn from my fixes” is on, Saywrite re-reads the text field for up to 30 seconds after pasting (stopping after 6 seconds without changes) to see what you corrected, so it can learn the right spelling. To choose a style in your browser, it checks the window title for words like gmail, slack or github. None of this leaves your Mac.
What it stores on your Mac
Saywrite keeps these files in ~/Library/Application Support/Saywrite/:
- dictionary.json: your words and what they sound like, plus a log of what it learned (up to 200 entries).
- The review list: up to 200 words it wasn't sure about, each with a short audio clip (WAV) so you can hear what you said. An item and its clip are deleted when you resolve it.
- history.jsonl: for each dictation, the raw and final text, the app it went into and how long it took. It's kept until you delete it.
- last.wav: the audio of your last dictation, overwritten each time.
- testset/: the recordings from the voice test in Voice setup, with their corrected text.
The engine writes a log to ~/Library/Logs/Saywrite/. These are plain files and aren't encrypted, so treat them like your other documents. Choose “Open data folder” from the Saywrite menu to see them, and delete the folder to remove them. If you use Time Machine or another backup, they may be included like any other files on your Mac.
Clipboard
Saywrite pastes through the clipboard. By default each dictation stays on the clipboard afterwards. If you turn off “Keep each dictation on the clipboard”, your previous clipboard is put back 0.6 seconds after pasting. When you fix a word with ⌃⇧F, Saywrite may copy your selection (⌘C) to read it, then restore the clipboard.
Suggested words
If you choose “Suggest words from my projects”, Saywrite reads only the folder names of your recent VS Code and Cursor projects to suggest words for your dictionary. It doesn't open the files in them.
Password fields
Saywrite switches itself off in password managers and password fields.
Children
Saywrite collects no data from anyone, including children. Everything stays on the Mac it's used on.
Changes
If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted on this page with a new date.
Who we are
Saywrite is published by ICE32 Limited, the company behind Rarely Impossible. ICE32 Limited is registered in England and Wales (company number 07046272). Registered office: Platinum House, 23 Hinton Road, Bournemouth, BH1 2EF, United Kingdom.
Contact
Questions: [email protected].
This policy sits alongside the Rarely Impossible privacy policy and terms of use, which cover all our apps.