Dictation that never leaves your Mac

What it does, and what it refuses to do

Most dictation apps send your voice to a server. That is a reasonable engineering decision and a bad one for anyone whose work is confidential — therapists, lawyers, doctors, journalists — because their obligations do not have an exception for convenience.

Holos does the recognition on your Mac. Not as a setting you can switch on, but as the only thing it knows how to do.

• Your voice is never written to disk. Audio exists in memory while you speak and is gone when the dictation ends. There is no cache, no recordings folder, no “recently sent” queue.
• It works with the network off. The only thing Holos ever downloads is the speech model, once, the first time you pick a language that needs it. After that you can stay offline forever.
• No account, no sign-in, no telemetry. There is nothing to log into. Holos does not report how often you use it, or that you use it at all.
• Your history stays yours. Past dictations are kept as text on your Mac so nothing is lost when a window loses focus. Text only — never the audio — and you can turn it off or delete it in one click.

Don’t take our word for it

Privacy claims are easy to write and hard to check, so here is how to check ours. You do not need to trust the paragraph above.

open ~/Library/Application\ Support/Holos

Built for people who work in two languages

If you think in one language and write in another, most dictation apps make you choose one and stay there. Holos identifies the language sentence by sentence, so you can switch mid-paragraph and it follows you.

That mattered enough to be built properly. Ukrainian is easily mistaken for Russian by speech models — on a short or quietly-spoken sentence, Russian routinely scores higher — and the usual result is a transcript in a language you did not speak. Holos weighs the languages you actually use and can be told, permanently, never to answer in a particular one.

This is version 1.0

Holos is used every day — it wrote most of this page — but it is early, and two things are worth knowing before you download it. Recognition on a microphone that sits far from you, such as the one in a desktop display, is noticeably worse than on one close to your mouth. And while Ukrainian is identified correctly, the transcription of it is still improving.

If something is wrong, write to me. A real person reads it, and at this stage your report genuinely changes what gets built next.

Requirements

$39 a year

Fourteen days free, with no card and no account. If it does not fit the way you work, do nothing and it stops asking.