Privacy Policy

Last updated 2026-10-16.

Spectrum Dicta is dictation software you install on your own computer. This policy explains what happens to your voice, what leaves your machine, and the little we keep.

The short version: your voice is not our business. We never receive your audio, we never receive your transcriptions, and we do not run analytics of any kind.

Your voice

Local transcription. The audio is recorded, processed and transcribed on your computer. It does not leave it. This works with no internet connection at all.

Remote transcription. If you choose a remote provider and supply your own API key, your audio is sent from your computer directly to that provider — OpenAI, Groq, Mistral or whichever you configured — using your key and your account. It does not pass through us at any point. What that provider does with the audio is governed by their terms, not by this policy. We recommend reading them; they differ, and some retain data for a period.

The application always shows which engine will handle your next dictation, so you can tell the two apart before you speak.

What stays on your computer

• Transcription history, with the audio recording beside each entry, kept for the retention period you set.
• Your settings, including which provider you use.
• Your provider API keys, stored in your operating system’s credential store — Credential Manager on Windows, Keychain on macOS, Secret Service on Linux — never in a plain settings file.
• The speech models you download.

You can delete any of it from the application, or by deleting its data folder.

What we receive

Only what a licence needs to exist:

• Your licence key, when you activate it. We keep only a one-way fingerprint of it, never the key itself.
• A machine fingerprint for each computer you activate. It is derived from the identifier your operating system gives to its own installation, put through a one-way function with a salt that is specific to this product. It cannot be turned back into that identifier, and it is useless to any other product. Its only job is counting how many computers use one licence.
• The dates of purchase, activation and expiry.
• Your email address and order number, which Paddle, our reseller, passes to us when you buy, so we can send you your licence key and find your purchase if you write to us.
• The IP address of the request, as every internet service unavoidably does.

We do not receive your name unless you give it to the payment provider, an email address other than the one you bought with, your audio, your transcriptions, or any measurement of how you use the application. There is no account to create and no profile to build.

Payments are handled by Paddle.com, our reseller and Merchant of Record. Your card or bank details go to Paddle and never to us; Paddle’s own privacy notice covers what it does with them.

When your computer talks to the internet

Four moments, and no others:

1. Downloading a model, from Hugging Face. They see your IP address, as with any download.
2. Activating a licence, to our licensing service.
3. Checking for and downloading updates, sending the signed token your activation produced, always over an encrypted connection.
4. Remote transcription, to the provider you configured, if you configured one.

Everything else — dictating, transcribing locally, your history — happens with no network traffic.

How long we keep it

Your licence record, including the email address and order number Paddle passed to us, lives for as long as the licence does. Unlinking a computer from the application removes its fingerprint from our records. A refunded licence is revoked immediately.

Ask us to delete your licence record and we will, understanding that it also ends the licence.

Children

The product is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the new version is published here with its date. We will not apply a change retroactively to data already collected.

Contact

support@spectrumdicta.com · Octavio Emilio Criollo Ortiz, trading as Spectrum Dicta ABN 41 585 598 970 · 34 Eighth Avenue, Wilston QLD 4051, Australia

If you are not satisfied with how we handled your privacy enquiry, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au. If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you may instead complain to your national data protection authority.