Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 11, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how information is handled in Sotto, a dictation app for macOS (the “App”), and on its official website (the “Site”).

In short: Sotto does not collect your data. Transcription and AI refinement are designed to run entirely on your Mac, and no account is required. For website analytics (run only with your consent), see “About the Site” below.

Information we do not collect

The App does not collect or transmit any user data, including:

Audio data or recordings
Transcribed or AI-refined text
Personal information such as your name or email address
Usage analytics or crash reports

The App contains no analytics SDKs or tracking code of any kind.

On-device processing

Transcription is performed by macOS speech recognition (the Speech framework), and AI refinement by Apple Intelligence on-device language models — all on your Mac. No cloud speech or LLM APIs are used.

Audio is processed in real time for transcription only and is never saved as a recording.

Data stored on your Mac

The following data is stored only on your Mac and is never sent anywhere:

History — transcribed and refined text. You can turn it off in Settings and delete entries at any time from the history window.
Preferences — app settings such as your hotkey and languages.

Network connections

The App connects to external servers in exactly two cases:

Update checks — on launch, the App asks our update server whether a new version is available (via the Sparkle framework). This request contains no audio, text, or personally identifying information, and the developer does not collect or analyze access logs.
Speech model downloads — macOS may download speech recognition models from Apple’s servers, for example on first use. This is a macOS feature and is covered by Apple’s privacy policy.

macOS permissions

The App uses the following permissions. You can revoke either at any time in System Settings.

Microphone — to capture your voice for dictation.
Accessibility — to detect the global hotkey and insert refined text into the app you are using.

About the Site

To help us improve the Site, we use Firebase Analytics (Google Analytics 4, provided by Google LLC). Measurement starts only after you accept the consent banner shown at the bottom of the page. If you decline, no analytics code is loaded and nothing is collected.

Once you accept, data such as the following is collected:

Pages viewed and on-site actions such as clicks on the download button
Cookies that identify your browser (_ga / _ga_*, stored on your device for up to about 2 years)
Approximate region, referrer (the site you came from), and browser, OS, and device type

Your choice is stored in your browser (localStorage). You can change it at any time via “Cookie Settings” in the footer; withdrawing consent stops measurement and removes the measurement cookies.

The collected data is processed by Google. For details, see the Google Privacy Policy (https://policies.google.com/privacy) and “How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services” (https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites). Google Analytics data retention is set to the minimum (2 months). No advertising tracking is performed.

Separately, our hosting provider (Vercel) may process access logs (such as IP addresses) to serve the Site and keep it secure.

Changes to this policy

This policy may be updated from time to time. Changes will be posted on this page, with the “Last updated” date above revised.

Contact

If you have any questions about this policy, please contact the developer. Contact form