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
Meeting webhook (off unless you turn it on) — if you set a webhook URL in Settings → Integrations, each finished meeting’s summary, action items, tags, and participant names are POSTed there when the summary is ready, and again if you later edit it. This is the only path that hands meeting content to a third party of your choosing. The transcript is never included, offline meetings are never sent, and the URL must be https (localhost excepted). You can sign the requests with a secret so your receiver can verify they came from this app
Encrypted backup copy to iCloud Drive (off unless you turn it on) — you can have MimicScribe drop a copy of each encrypted
.mscbackupexport into iCloud Drive. The archive is encrypted on your Mac before it is written, with a key only you hold, so Apple stores ciphertext. Everything else about backup is local. See Backup & RestoreLicense 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 between Macs and never uploads a recording anywhere. The one way any of this leaves the Mac is an encrypted backup export you ask for, and even then the archive holds the database, not the audio files. Meeting audio is saved locally as compressed mono M4A files (~14.4 MB/hr) to power transcript playback and speaker tagging, and is automatically pruned after 30 days by default (configurable in Settings). 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, action items, transform history, reference document indexes) | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/mimicscribe.db |
| Audio recordings (local M4A playback, 30-day auto-prune) | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/Recordings/ |
Local database snapshots and encrypted .mscbackup exports | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/Backups/ |
| Diagnostic logs, only while you have them turned on | ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/DiagnosticLogs/ |
| Settings, prompts, dictation profiles, and summary views | The app’s own preferences (defaults read app.mimicscribe) — not a folder |
| Speech models | ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/ |
| Spotlight index (meeting titles, summaries, tags, transcript text) | macOS Spotlight index — on-device, managed by macOS |
There is no Templates/ folder. Your edited prompts, your dictation profiles, and your summary views are preference values, not files, so they travel with the app’s preferences rather than with the database.
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 ~/Library/Application Support/ by default, so your database, snapshots, and audio recordings are all covered automatically.
If you don’t use Time Machine, the key location to back up is:
~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/— database, local snapshots, and audio recordings
These are standard files that can be copied, moved, or synced with any backup tool.
MimicScribe also keeps its own rotating local snapshots and can write an encrypted, portable export — see Backup & Restore for both, and for the recovery key you need to keep.
Speech recognition models don’t need to be backed up — see the next section.
Speech recognition models
MimicScribe downloads about 1.4 GB of models, most of it on first launch:
| Model | Purpose | Size |
|---|---|---|
| Parakeet Ultra | Speech-to-text transcription | ~632 MB |
| Multilingual MiniLM (L12-v2) | Reference document & meeting search | ~500 MB |
| Speaker diarization | Identifying who is speaking | ~22 MB |
| Nemotron 3 speaker refinement | Checking and refining who spoke, after a meeting | ~190 MB |
| LocalVQE | Echo cancellation for meetings | ~5 MB |
| Silero VAD | Voice activity detection | ~1 MB |
The speech, diarization, speaker-refinement and VAD models live in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models/. The speaker-refinement model downloads in the background after launch, only while the app is idle, on a network that isn’t a hotspot or in Low Data Mode, and never while Offline mode is on; it runs on your Mac like the others, and audio never leaves it. The embedding model is cached by HuggingFace under ~/.cache/huggingface/, and LocalVQE sits alongside the database in ~/Library/Application Support/app.mimicscribe/.
Nothing else downloads unless you ask for it. The one exception is a 38 MB helper for importing audio from a web page, and it is only fetched if you press Install for that feature.
The search model became multilingual in rc.31, which is why it is larger than it was — it covers all 25 languages rather than English alone. See Languages.
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.
Crash reports (no usage analytics)
MimicScribe sends no usage analytics: it does not report which features you use or how often. (Cloud AI requests carry the billing metadata listed in Network activity, which plans need for metering.)
Settings → AI & Data — under the Privacy group in the sidebar, alongside the Network Log — has one toggle: Send crash & error reports automatically. A report carries the app and macOS version, the error type or crash location (function names, never file paths), and a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware identifier so repeat crashes on one Mac can be grouped. That hash cannot be reversed to identify you and uses a different salt than the billing identifier, so the two cannot be correlated. No audio, transcript text, or meeting content is ever included, and everything sent is deleted from our server after 90 days.
It is off by default, whatever AI option you choose. Off means “ask me first”: if MimicScribe crashes, the next launch asks whether to send that one report (with an option to always send). Error events that aren’t crashes are only sent when the toggle is on.
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.