What stays on your Mac
Transcript history, learned corrections, correction pairs, writing samples, and writing profiles are stored encrypted on the device. Audio from a successful dictation is held in memory and never written to disk.
When a dictation fails, its audio is written to the encrypted local store so the words are not lost, and it is deleted 24 hours after that session started — whether or not it was ever recovered.
What can leave your Mac, and to whom
Simply Speak ships two speech models and two polish models. Half of them never make a network request at all.
- Apple SpeechTranscriber — speech recognition on the device. No audio leaves the Mac.
- AssemblyAI Universal Streaming— audio streams from your Mac directly to AssemblyAI using a short-lived scoped token. Simply Speak’s own server issues that token and never receives the audio.
- Deterministic polish — punctuation, filler removal, and formatting run locally. No text leaves the Mac.
- Cloud polish— the transcript text, and the bounded surrounding context needed to match the writing you are already doing, pass through Simply Speak’s server to a third-party language-model provider. No audio is sent on this path.
Local only, in Settings › Privacy and recovery, turns every cloud request off and leaves the two on-device models working.
What an account syncs
Signing in syncs your dictionary entries, snippets, styles, and preferences so a second Mac behaves like the first. Transcript history, audio, clipboard content, and correction pairs are not part of that sync and stay on the device that produced them.
Operational measurements
Usage records are content-free: duration, model identifiers, latency stages, estimated cost, outcome, and whether insertion succeeded. They exist to keep the product fast and honest about what it costs, and they never contain what was said.
How long anything is kept
- Failed-session audio on your Mac — 24 hours from the start of that session.
- Synced items you delete — removed permanently 30 days after deletion.
- Usage records — 90 days.
- Payment provider records, once billing is live — 400 days, for tax and dispute windows.
Deleting your account removes the synced account data. Anything held only on your Mac goes with the app when you remove it.
What the website handles
This website handles account authentication and nothing else. It never receives transcript history, audio, clipboard content, surrounding writing context, or learned correction pairs.
Before publication
The final policy still needs the legal business identity, a published contact address, regional disclosures, and professional review.