Dictami is written, tested, supported and shipped by Yuliy Metelskiy, an independent macOS developer. There is no company behind it, no investors, and nobody else to escalate to — the person who answers support email is the person who wrote the line of code you are asking about.
You do not have to take that on trust. Every build is signed with an Apple Developer ID issued to that name, and Apple checks who a person is before issuing one. Read it back off the app you downloaded:
codesign -dv --verbose=2 /Applications/Dictami.appIt prints Authority=Developer ID Application: Yuliy Metelskiy (AQVKLV5HJK).
Dictation is the one thing people do with a computer where the raw material is their own voice: what they are drafting, who they are writing to, what they said out loud before they thought better of it. Sending that to a server means trusting somebody to hold it, and asking you to trust a stranger with it is worse.
So there is no server to trust. The recognition model runs on your machine, the audio never leaves it, and the app keeps working with the network switched off entirely. That is a statement you can check, not a policy you have to believe.
Software that phones home every month can be switched off from the other end. Dictami has a licence that never expires for a single payment, because an app that keeps working offline should keep working when its author stops shipping updates — or stops altogether.
Shorter licences exist for people who want to pay less to start. They buy the same app; nothing is held back for the higher tier.
Native macOS, written in Swift, with speech recognition based on Whisper compiled for Apple Silicon. It requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later on an M1 or newer — the on-device speed the app is built around comes from that hardware, and pretending otherwise on an Intel Mac would only disappoint.
Bugs, refunds, licence trouble, or a language you wish it handled better: [email protected]. Replies come from a person, usually within a day.
The privacy policy spells out exactly what the app stores and what it never collects. The terms cover the licence and the 14-day refund.
7-day trial inside the app. No card, no account.
Download Dictami