Arc Forge Labs Docs v2026.10.2
Dictate

Dictate Privacy Policy Source Copy

Date: 2026-09-30

This is the repository source copy for the public Dictate privacy page at https://arcforge.au/privacy/dictate. Publish the current contents there when the page is next updated.

Everything stays on the device

Dictate transcribes speech on the user's own machine. There is no account, no subscription, no provider API key, and no hosted transcription. Microphone audio never leaves the device, and Arc Forge does not receive dictation text, audio, or transcripts at all.

Microphone audio is used only while you dictate and is not kept. Dictation history, notes, custom words, spelling substitutions and app preferences are stored in the operating-system user data directory:

  • Linux: ~/.config/dictate/ and ~/.local/share/dictate/
  • Windows: %APPDATA%\dictate\ and %LOCALAPPDATA%\dictate\

dictate export-local exports history and notes to JSON. The Linux and Windows uninstall scripts remove that data when run with --remove-user-data / -RemoveUserData; removing the Linux .deb package leaves it in place, and it can be deleted by hand.

What does reach the network

Transcription itself never touches the network. Only these do, and none of them carry dictation content:

  • Update checks. Installs outside the Microsoft Store ask GitHub's release and tag endpoints whether a newer version exists when Dictate starts; the beta channel also asks the npm registry. Applying an update downloads the release from GitHub, or for source installs the update script from jsDelivr. These requests carry the usual information any web request does, such as an IP address, and no dictation content.
  • Model downloads, only outside the installed app. The desktop app ships with the model it uses (Parakeet), so it downloads nothing to transcribe. Source installs, and models chosen from the command line that are not bundled, download model files from Hugging Face once, without a token.
  • Microsoft Store. Installs from the Store are updated by the Store and subject to Microsoft's own install and update telemetry. Arc Forge does not receive dictation content through it.

Dictate has no analytics, no crash reporting, and no usage telemetry, and turns off the telemetry its bundled libraries would otherwise send, before any of them load: ONNX Runtime's Microsoft telemetry (the engine that runs Parakeet; it keeps a device ID and uploads usage events to Microsoft by default) and Hugging Face Hub telemetry.

Dictate 2026.9.27 and earlier did not turn these off. Those versions sent ONNX Runtime usage events (session creation, graph optimisation and run timings, with a device ID) to Microsoft whenever they transcribed, and Meeting mode (since removed, #140) reported pipeline use to pyannote. Neither included audio or transcript text.

Diagnostics

Dictate writes local log files for troubleshooting. Logs contain app status, file paths, model names, environment details and error text. They do not contain dictated text: a finished dictation or note is logged as its length only. Logs are never transmitted. Users should still check them for private names or a Hugging Face token before attaching them to a bug report.

Third-party software

Dictate bundles open-source libraries and models under their own licences, including the Parakeet model (CC-BY-4.0). Notices ship with the app as THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md and are published at https://arcforge.au/legal/notices.

Changes

Earlier versions of Dictate offered accounts, subscriptions, encrypted cloud sync and hosted transcription. Those were removed on 2026-09-19 and the supporting code was deleted. Any data previously held server-side is out of scope for this document; the current application has no server side.

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