What Vaitly Voice can and cannot protect

Last updated 23 September 2026

The threat model, in plain English

Security pages tend to say "we take security seriously" and stop. This one lists who could see what.

Someone with your laptop

If a person has your unlocked computer, they can see whatever Vaitly Voice has kept: the history of what you have dictated, and any audio the app is still holding, until you delete it. Two things limit that. First, the retention setting: you choose in Settings how long audio is kept, from three days to never deleting them, and you can clear history at any time. Second, the usual operating-system protections apply, because Vaitly Voice stores nothing outside your user account: on a Mac, FileVault and your login password; on Windows, your Windows sign-in and BitLocker or device encryption where it is on. They protect its data the same way they protect your documents.

Someone watching your network

No audio, and no dictated text from standard dictation, because recognition happens on your computer and there is no network path for either. They would see the app download the speech model on first run; register an anonymous identity with Google Firebase at first launch, and again whenever you sign in; report the number of words in a dictation, so the free allowance can be counted; send anonymous product analytics, which are on unless you turn them off in Settings; check the license; and, only if you have set one up, send the text of a cloud transform to the provider you chose, or, in Pro, the text you send to Cloud Polish. All of those connections use TLS.

Vaitly, the company

If you have an account, we know the email address on it and which plan it holds. From every install, including free ones with no account, we receive anonymous usage counts tied to a device identity: roughly, how many words were dictated this week, so the free allowance of 1,000 words can be enforced. We never receive audio, or the names of the apps you dictate into. On Free, there is no mechanism in the app that sends dictated text unless you set up a cloud transform yourself. Pro changes one thing: when you use Cloud Polish or meeting summaries, that text passes through our server to OpenAI. Audio never does.

Where things are stored

History, audio and the speech model live in the app's own data folder: under Library/Application Support in your home folder on a Mac, and in your user profile on Windows. They are ordinary files on your own disk, under your user account, so they inherit whatever protection the disk has: FileVault on a Mac, BitLocker or device encryption on a PC where it is on, and your login password. Nothing is stored in iCloud or any other cloud, nothing is synced between devices today, and removing the app and that folder removes everything.

Audio retention is yours to set

Settings → Advanced (Auto-Delete Recordings) lets you choose how long audio recordings are kept: three days, two weeks, three months, or never deleted. Out of the box it keeps only the latest five recordings, so you can replay a recent dictation and correct the text without a pile building up. There is no setting that keeps none at all: the most recent recording exists until the next one replaces it, or until you delete it. History entries can be deleted one at a time or cleared in bulk. This is the single most useful control for the "someone with my laptop" case, so if that worries you, set retention to three days and clear the history.

The one optional boundary: cloud transforms

Transforms rewrite text after it is recognized: tidy this up, make it an email, translate it. By default they use Apple Intelligence on a Mac, or a local Ollama model on a Mac or PC, both on your own computer. You can instead configure a cloud provider with your own key. If you do, three things hold: only text is sent, never audio; the transform is labeled as cloud in the app so you know before you use it; and nothing is sent unless you invoke that transform. Standard dictation is unaffected. If you never configure a provider, no dictated text leaves your computer for any reason.

Pro features and their boundary

Pro adds four things that involve Vaitly's server, on Mac and Windows. Vaitly Meetings is in beta. Each is narrower than it could have been, and none of them sends audio.

• Vaitly Meetings recording. Calls are detected on your computer from which app is using the microphone. No bot joins, and nothing is installed in or granted to Teams, Zoom or any other service, so no admin or tenant permission is involved. Microphone and call audio are transcribed on your computer and never written to disk; transcripts are stored locally, and each recognized line is journaled locally so a crash loses nothing.
• Meeting summaries and questions about your meetings. (The weekly meetings pack is assembled on your computer from summaries you already have and sends nothing.) The transcript text goes to Vaitly's API, never to OpenAI directly, and the app holds no provider key. The server checks your account and plan, sends the text to OpenAI with storage off, and logs counts, never content. Replies are checked against the transcript: an owner nobody named is removed, and an item carrying a number the meeting never mentioned is dropped. Zero data retention is not in place with OpenAI.
• Cloud Polish. The same path for the finished text of a dictation, with a monthly spending ceiling and a check on the reply before it is returned.
• Encrypted backup. Each item is encrypted on your device before upload, sent over TLS 1.3, kept encrypted in transit and at rest, and opened only by a machine signed into your account. Audio is not included.

Code signing and notarization

Every build of Vaitly Voice is signed with an Apple Developer ID certificate issued to Vaitly Limited and submitted to Apple for notarization, with the hardened runtime enabled. When you open the app, macOS verifies the signature and the notarization ticket before it runs. This means the app you launch is the one we built, has not been altered on the way to you, and cannot load unsigned code into itself. If Gatekeeper warns you about a copy of Vaitly Voice, that copy is not ours: download again from the download page and tell us. On Windows, the installer and the app are Authenticode-signed by Vaitly Limited. The installer puts Vaitly Voice in your own user account and asks for no administrator rights. Before you run it, you can check the signer under Properties → Digital Signatures; if it does not say Vaitly Limited, do not run it.

Updates

Honest answer: there is no in-app updater yet. Updates are downloaded from the download page and installed the same way as the first copy: on a Mac by dragging to Applications, on Windows by running the new installer. Settings, vocabulary and history are kept. The version you are running is shown in the app; the current releases are 1.0.0 for Mac and 1.1.0 for Windows.

What the license check sends

The app holds a signed license and an anonymous device identity. When it checks in, it sends those and receives back whether the plan is valid and how many words remain on the free tier. That is the whole exchange: no dictated content, no audio, no file or app names. A paid plan covers 5 devices, in any mix of Mac and Windows, and the device identity is what lets you move it between them from Settings → Account.

Reporting a security problem

Email letstalk@vaitlyvoice.com with what you found and how to reproduce it. We acknowledge every report within one working day, keep you informed while we work on it, and thank you in the changelog if you would like. Please give us a reasonable window to fix it before you publish. We do not run a paid bounty program at this stage.

What we are not

Vaitly Voice has no SOC 2, ISO 27001 or HIPAA certification, and we do not claim any. We have not yet published a penetration-test report. We make no claim that Vaitly Voice is suitable for medical, legal or other regulated work; whether it meets your obligations is a judgment for you and your organization, and we would rather you made it with the facts above than with a badge. As those things change, this page will change with them.

Limits and the privacy boundary

Nothing on this page makes Vaitly Voice "completely secure", because nothing is. What it does is keep the sensitive part, your voice and the text it becomes, on hardware you control, and make every exception visible and optional. The privacy policy covers the legal side; offline recognition covers the technical one.

Compared with cloud dictation

A cloud dictation service has to protect your audio on its servers, in transit, and in the hands of its staff and subprocessors, and you have to trust that it does. Vaitly Voice's approach is to have no audio to protect on any server in the first place. See how Vaitly Voice compares with the alternatives.