Privacy

Updated 2026-10-28. Voice is Local and this website are made by Bjola Software Inc., British Columbia, Canada.

The app

Voice is Local processes speech on your Mac with Apple's on-device speech recognition, on-device speaker-labelling models, and, if you turn on the misheard-word fix, Apple Intelligence running on your Mac. It reads text aloud with Apple's voices or with natural voices that also run on your Mac. It never sends your audio, transcripts, readings, speaker names, or voiceprints to Bjola or to anyone else. It has no account, no analytics, and no telemetry.

• Kept on your Mac: meeting audio, transcripts, speaker labels, the names you give speakers, your corrections, and the audio files Reading makes.
• Dictation history: each dictation's text, and its audio, for 30 days by default. In Settings you can keep it for 7 days or forever, stop keeping the audio, or turn history off.
• Screen capture: off by default. If you turn it on, snapshots of your displays during a meeting are kept with that meeting to improve its transcript.
• Voiceprints: only if you turn on Remember voices, which is off by default. Voice samples are stored in your Application Support folder and excluded from Time Machine. You can forget one person's voice, or all of them, at any time, and deleting a meeting can also forget the samples learned from it. Each meeting's review window has a "Learn voices of people I name in this meeting" box, which starts ticked.
• Clipboard: the app writes to your clipboard only when you choose Copy.
• Downloaded: the speech model for each language you use comes from Apple, and the speaker-labelling models (about 21 MB) come from Hugging Face. Natural reading voices (530 MB to 1.9 GB per language) come from Hugging Face, only if you choose to download them.
• Updates: the app asks once whether to check for updates automatically. If you say yes, about once a day it fetches the list of versions from this website; the request names the app and its version, and nothing about your Mac or what you do with it is sent. Check for Updates… in the menu bar menu fetches the same list whenever you choose it, whatever your answer. A new version downloads only when you choose to install it.
• Web pages: when you ask Reading to read a link, the app fetches that page, as a browser would. Nothing is uploaded.

The app's source code is public at github.com/orlenko/holos, so you can check these statements yourself.

This website

• No cookies, no analytics, no tracking pixels, no embedded content.
• Fonts and images are served from this site. Your browser contacts no other server.
• The Buy a coffee link opens Stripe's checkout page, a separate site (see Payments below).
• The web server keeps standard access and error logs (IP address, time, page requested, browser identification) for security and troubleshooting, and deletes them after about two weeks.
• Downloads of the app are counted from those logs once a day. Only the number of downloads of each file on each day is kept; no IP address or browser identification goes into the count.

Payments

The app is free. Buying the author a coffee is optional, and the payment is processed by Stripe on its own checkout page, where Stripe's privacy policy applies. Bjola receives your name, email address, and payment details from Stripe (never your full card number), and uses them only for receipts, refunds, and answering you.

Contact

Questions or requests: contact@bjola.ca.