Private voice-to-text for Mac
On-device dictation that keeps your words on your Mac.
RoughSay can transcribe English, German, Polish, French, and Spanish entirely on your Mac. In Private on-device mode, microphone audio and transcripts are not sent to OpenAI or the RoughSay relay, even while you are online.
- Local transcriptionAudio is processed by a model running on your Mac.
- No OpenAI callPrivate dictation does not send content for AI rewriting.
- Works offlineAfter invite verification and the model download.
What stays local in Private on-device mode
Your microphone audio, transcript, app or website match, text replacements, dictionary, preview history, and local usage count stay on your Mac. Private dictation does not read reply context, construct a polishing prompt, or send dictation content to the relay. Translate Selection reads only text you explicitly select and translates it on-device.
Local text replacements can still correct names, specialist terms, addresses, links, and product spellings before the transcript is delivered.
What you can still do without the cloud
Private dictation supports preview, direct paste, Auto delivery, Apple Notes capture, and the recent-file picker. Translate Selection also remains available using Apple's on-device Translation framework. App and site matching can choose only the local delivery behavior; full browser URLs are discarded and are not stored or sent.
Because this mode returns a clean raw transcript rather than an AI rewrite, it is a good fit when the wording itself must remain local or when you are working without an internet connection.
One-time setup, then offline dictation
RoughSay verifies the beta invite once and downloads an approximately 500 MB multilingual transcription model from Hugging Face. The invite is stored in macOS Keychain and the model is stored locally. With both present, Private on-device dictation can continue offline.
The downloaded model can be removed from Settings. Private transcription currently requires macOS 15 or newer.
Cloud polishing remains an explicit choice
When you want RoughSay to restructure or rewrite a thought, switch to On-device + polish or Cloud + polish. On-device + polish keeps microphone audio local but sends the transcript and any optional context through the relay to OpenAI. Cloud + polish sends both audio and the polishing inputs through the relay.