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Your dictation app should never see the internet

Think about what you actually say to a dictation app. Emails to clients. Half-formed ideas. That message you rewrote three times. Dictation hears your thoughts before you have had a chance to edit them. It is the rawest version of you.

Most dictation apps work like this: they record your voice, send it over the internet to a company's computers, turn it into text there, and send the text back. The company promises to be careful with it. You have to take their word for it.

YappYapp makes a different deal: your voice never leaves your Mac. Ever.

What that means, in plain words

  • The part that turns your speech into text lives inside the app, on your computer. Nothing is sent away to be transcribed. If you pulled out your internet cable mid-sentence, dictation would keep working.
  • The app is built so it cannot secretly phone home. We have an automatic tripwire that checks every new version of the app: if anyone (including us) ever adds a hidden connection, the tripwire goes off and that version cannot ship. The promise is enforced by a machine, not by a pinky swear.
  • The app touches the internet for exactly two things, and both are visible switches you can turn off: downloading a voice model when you first pick one (a one-time thing, like downloading a big file), and a once-a-day check for app updates that sends nothing but a version number.
  • If you click into a password box, YappYapp refuses to work at all. It will not type there, and it will not even keep what you said. It tells you exactly that, in plain words.

The honest downsides

Doing everything on your own Mac has costs, and you deserve to know them. The voice models take up space on your disk (you pick how much, from small to large). The newest Macs feel instant; older ones are slower. And the optional cleanup feature, which removes your "ums", also runs on your machine, so it takes about a second.

We think that trade is obviously worth it for a tool that hears you think out loud. Your voice is the last honest draft. It should stay yours.