Nothing leaves the machine.

The whole flow, channel by channel

A channel is a purpose you point the microphone at. Your voice can take four paths, and each one answers the same four questions. Read the path you use.

Dictate

• Who listensDispatch
• Who transcribesApple's engine, on your Mac
• Where the words landPasted at your cursor
• What leaves your MacNothing

Dictate in passthrough

• Who listensYour dictation app. Dispatch drives its shortcut and transcribes nothing.
• Who transcribesThat app, under its own privacy policy
• Where the words landWherever that app puts them
• What leaves your MacWhatever that app sends. Dispatch sends nothing.

Note

• Who listensDispatch
• Who transcribesApple's engine, on your Mac
• Where the words landA Markdown file in a folder you chose
• What leaves your MacNothing. If the folder you chose syncs somewhere, that is your sync service doing the sending, not Dispatch.

To-do

• Who listensDispatch
• Who transcribesApple's engine, on your Mac
• Where the words landOne line in todo.txt, in a folder you chose
• What leaves your MacNothing. If the folder you chose syncs somewhere, that is your sync service doing the sending, not Dispatch.

What Dispatch hears

Audio from the microphone streams to Apple's speech engine running on your Mac. It is transcribed as you speak, in memory and never written to disk. There is no recording to delete because none is kept.

Where the words go

The transcript lands where you pointed it: pasted at your cursor, saved as a note in a folder you chose, or added as a line to your to-do list. It also stays on the clipboard so you can paste it again. Dispatch keeps one more copy of its own, in the ledger below. Every copy is yours, on your disk.

The ledger

Dispatch keeps what it transcribed so you can find it again. Dictate transmissions are written as text, one file per day, in Dispatch's own folder at ~/Library/Application Support/Dispatch/Ledger. Notes are not copied there — the ledger reads them where they already sit, in your Note folder. No audio is kept, ever. There is nothing to play back, because nothing was recorded.

Settings has a switch called Title and tag notes, and it starts off. Turn it on and Apple's on-device model reads each note once after it is saved, giving it a short title and a tag or two. That model is part of macOS and runs on your Mac, so the note does not leave it and nothing is sent to Apple or to us. Dispatch also keeps a short list of the tag names it has used, which helps it reuse a word rather than invent a near-copy of one. That list holds names and counts, never anything you said. Leave the switch off and no model reads anything.

Settings has a Ledger page with a switch called Keep Dictate transcriptions. Turn it off and Dispatch keeps nothing new, though what is already saved stays until you remove it.

The files are plain markdown. Open them, edit them, or throw them away in the Finder, and the ledger window follows. Deleting from that window does the same thing by another route: a Dictate line is removed from its day file, and a note is moved to the Trash, where you can still get it back.

To-dos are kept apart from all of this, in a folder of their own that starts at ~/Documents/Dispatch/To-do. Each one is a line in todo.txt, the standard plain-text format, so any todo.txt app can read it. A to-do you finish moves to done.txt in the same folder the next day you open the ledger. projects.txt holds your project names and their colours, and nothing else. Add notes to a to-do and they go in a markdown file of their own, in a notes folder beside the list. Delete a to-do from the ledger and its line and its notes are removed for good, with no Trash to fish them out of.

Your Note folder starts at ~/Documents/Dispatch and you can point it anywhere you like. If you leave it in Documents and you have iCloud Desktop & Documents switched on, your notes sync through iCloud the way everything else in that folder does. That is Apple's sync, running on your account. Dispatch does not send them anywhere.

The orange dot

macOS shows the microphone indicator whenever the selected channel transcribes on your Mac, which is Dictate on the built-in engine, Note or To-do. That is deliberate. Dispatch holds the microphone open with a half-second rolling buffer, continuously overwritten in memory, so the first word of a transmission isn't clipped. Nothing is transcribed until you squeeze the trigger. The squeeze sends that buffered half second along with everything after it, which is how the start of your sentence survives. Point Dictate at a passthrough app and Dispatch closes the microphone. The indicator goes out until you dial to Note or To-do, or back to the built-in engine. Quit the app and the microphone is released.

When another app does the listening

In passthrough, Dispatch presses your dictation app's shortcut and that app does the listening. Dispatch's own microphone stays closed — it captures nothing, transcribes nothing and sends nothing anywhere. What the other app does with your audio is governed by its privacy policy, not this one.

Permissions, and what each one is for

• MicrophoneTo hear you. Held open the whole time Dispatch runs.
• Speech RecognitionUnlocks Apple's transcription engine. The transcription itself runs on your Mac.
• Input MonitoringTo see the trigger. Dispatch reads one device, the microphone, matched by its hardware ID. It does not watch your keyboard.
• AccessibilityTo place text at your cursor. This is the paste.

The network

Dispatch makes no network requests you have not allowed. No analytics, no crash reporting, no accounts, no phoning home.

One request exists. It fetches a small file from this site that names the current version. It sends nothing about you or your Mac, and carries only your IP address, the same as loading this page. It runs when you choose "Check for Updates…", and once a day on its own only if you turned on "Check for updates automatically" in Settings. It starts off. Dispatch asks you about it once, with yes as the suggested answer, and you can change it at any time. If a newer version exists, a dot appears on the menu bar icon and the menu offers the notes and the download, which opens in your browser. It installs nothing.

One exception, once: the first time the on-device engine runs, macOS downloads Apple's language model from Apple. That is an operating-system download. It contains no data of yours, and nothing of yours goes up to get it.

What keeps this page true

Everything above describes architecture, not policy. A policy can change with an update. Dispatch would need a server before any of this could, and it doesn't have one. If a future version ever opens a network path, this page changes in the same release that ships it.

This website

No cookies. Visits are counted by Cloudflare Web Analytics, which is cookie-free, does not identify you and does not follow you across sites — it reports totals, not people. The type loads from Google Fonts. Those are the only third-party requests, and visiting any page here with ?notrack added to the address turns the counting off in your browser for good.

Getting in touch

There is no account system and no telemetry, so nothing here can tell me that something went wrong. If you hit a bug, have a question about anything on this page, or want a destination that doesn't exist yet, write to dispatch@rexchekal.com. It reaches a person.