Privacy & Data
Does MimicScribe work offline?
Core speech-to-text transcription works completely offline — the model runs on-device using Apple Silicon. The text-AI features (dictation corrections, text transforms, meeting summaries, assistant, and search) use a cloud model by default and need an internet connection. You can also run them on-device with no network at all: Apple’s built-in on-device model for dictation and transform (macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence), or a local server for every feature. See On-Device AI.
What data leaves my device?
Only when you actively use the features that need them:
AI feature requests — when you use dictation corrections, text transforms, or meeting summaries, the transcribed text (never audio) is sent to whichever AI provider you choose. The default is Google Gemini via a server-side proxy. To change where it goes, point MimicScribe at your own OpenAI-compatible endpoint in Settings → AI & Data — one mechanism covers every case. That endpoint can be a provider your company already trusts (Microsoft Foundry, Amazon Bedrock, a company gateway, your own Gemini key), or a fully local model that sends nothing off the Mac. On any of these the request skips our proxy entirely. See Custom Endpoint and On-Device AI.
Audio is processed entirely on your Mac on every path. Depending on the feature, the request may also include:
- Dictation mode: your configured name, personal context, and vocabulary list (if set in Preferences)
- Transform mode: the selected text from the active app, plus clipboard text if you say “clipboard” or “pasteboard” in your instruction
- Reference documents: when you add a URL or file as a reference document (Settings → Meeting Recording), its content is sent to Google Gemini once for processing into searchable sections. After processing, only relevant sections are included in AI requests — the full document is not sent on every call. Reference document content and search indexes are stored locally on your device
License validation — a periodic check to verify your license key against our server. Billing is handled by Stripe; the app never contacts Stripe directly. No personal data beyond the key itself is sent
Usage reporting (paid plans only — Light or Unlimited) — aggregate token counts and feature names are sent to track subscription usage against your plan. No transcription text is included
Device identifier — a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware ID is sent to our proxy server to enforce free-tier usage limits. It is not stored permanently, not shared with Google or any third party, and cannot be used to identify you personally
What data stays on my device?
All audio, transcripts, meeting recordings, and speaker profiles are stored locally. MimicScribe does not sync data between Macs or upload recordings to any server. If Spotlight indexing is on (Settings > Integrations), your meetings are also indexed into the local, on-device macOS Spotlight index so you can find them from ⌘Space — that index never leaves your Mac either.
Window titles and the browser address bar are read on your Mac and never stored anywhere. See Accessibility below.
Accessibility (optional)
Accessibility is the macOS permission that lets one app read and control another. Two MimicScribe features use it. Both are off until you switch them on in Settings, setup never asks for it, and recording, transcription, speaker identification, and summaries don’t use it.
- Dictation and Transform put text into the app you’re working in, at your cursor. Transform also reads whatever text you have selected there.
- Automatic recording works out a meeting has started using whatever signal each app actually gives off. Microsoft Teams and Slack report a call directly, through a power assertion the OS already tracks; Zoom through a helper process it runs only during a call — none of the three is recognized by its audio, and none of the three needs this permission at all. A browser is different: there’s no such signal to read, so MimicScribe reads its window titles and address bar to recognize a meeting site.
| Reads | When | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Window titles of a browser MimicScribe is checking for a meeting | Automatic recording, about once a second — triggered by the browser itself reporting a call in progress (or, for Safari, simply being open, since Safari has no such signal to check first), not by whether audio is currently playing | In memory, 12 most recent, gone when you quit |
| The frontmost browser’s address bar | Same trigger as the window title read above, and when a dictation starts in a browser | In memory for the recording, then discarded |
| The text you selected | You press the Transform shortcut | Sent to your AI provider as the text to transform |
| Keyboard and mouse events | While a single-modifier shortcut is set | Nothing kept; unmatched events pass through |
The permission is a single switch. Anything holding it can read the contents of any app’s window, including web page text, and can see every keystroke. macOS doesn’t scope it to particular apps or attributes, so the reads above are MimicScribe’s own boundaries rather than limits the system enforces.
Revoke it at any time in System Settings → Privacy & Security → Accessibility. Dictation still transcribes without it and offers ⌘C to copy instead of pasting.
Where is my data stored?
| Data | Location |
|---|---|
| Database (transcripts, meetings, speaker profiles, reference document indexes) | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/mimicscribe.db |
| Audio recordings (if enabled) | ~/Documents/MimicScribe/Recordings/ |
| Prompt templates (dictation / transform) | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/Templates/ |
| Speech models | ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/ |
| Spotlight index (meeting titles, summaries, tags, transcript text) | macOS Spotlight index — on-device, managed by macOS |
You can open these folders in Finder by pasting the path into Go > Go to Folder (Shift+Cmd+G).
How do I back up my data?
Time Machine backs up both ~/Library/Application Support/ and ~/Documents/ by default, so your database, templates, and audio recordings are all covered automatically.
If you don’t use Time Machine, the key locations to back up are:
~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/— database and templates~/Documents/MimicScribe/Recordings/— audio files
These are standard files that can be copied, moved, or synced with any backup tool.
Speech recognition models don’t need to be backed up — see the next section.
Speech recognition models
MimicScribe downloads five models on first launch:
| Model | Purpose | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B (v3) | Speech-to-text transcription | ~460 MB |
| Speaker diarization | Identifying who is speaking | ~34 MB |
| Silero VAD | Voice activity detection | ~1 MB |
| MiniLM (L6-v2) | Reference document & meeting search | ~90 MB |
| LocalVQE | Echo cancellation for meetings | ~5 MB |
The speech, diarization, and VAD models are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/ and use about 500 MB of disk space total. The MiniLM embedding model is cached by HuggingFace (under ~/.cache/huggingface/) and uses about 90 MB. The small LocalVQE echo-cancellation model (~5 MB) lives alongside the database in ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/.
Safe to delete. If you need to free up space, you can delete these model folders. No data is lost — only the pre-trained model weights are removed, and MimicScribe re-downloads whatever’s missing on the next launch.
When you next launch MimicScribe, it will automatically re-download the models in the background. If you try to dictate or record before the download finishes, you’ll see a brief “Loading model…” overlay that disappears once the models are ready. The re-download requires an internet connection; after that, all transcription runs fully offline.
Optional analytics
Settings > Privacy offers two toggles:
- Send anonymous usage signals — specific event names are listed in the settings panel so you can see exactly what’s reported
- Send anonymized crash logs — helps us fix bugs faster
Both default to on during onboarding and can be turned off at any time. Choosing Local Mode in onboarding turns both off automatically. No personal data, audio, or transcription text is ever included, and everything sent is automatically deleted from our server after 90 days. Usage signals include a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware identifier so we can count distinct devices — this hash cannot be reversed to identify you personally and uses a different salt than the billing identifier, so the two cannot be correlated.
Verify it yourself
Settings → Network Log shows every request the app sends, live — what it was for, where it went, and when. Every endpoint MimicScribe contacts is also documented and inspectable from outside the app: see Network Activity for the full inventory and the nettop / lsof commands to confirm what’s leaving your Mac at any moment.