Offline dictation on Mac: what TalkingKey contacts
TalkingKey is a push-to-talk dictation app for macOS 26 (Tahoe) and Apple Silicon. Your voice is transcribed on your Mac with whisper.cpp (Whisper large-v3-turbo, Metal-accelerated). The audio never leaves the device and no text is sent anywhere. The app does talk to three servers for reasons that have nothing to do with your speech. Here is the full list.
| When | Who it talks to | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| First run, once | Hugging Face (huggingface.co) | A download request for the speech model (about 574 MB). Standard request metadata such as your IP address. No personal data. |
| When you activate or start the app with a license | Lemon Squeezy, our payment provider and Merchant of Record | Your license key. On activation also your Mac's device name, so the license can be tied to one Mac. On later checks the key and an instance ID. |
| Periodically | talkingkey.com (update check) | Your IP address and the current app version. |
| While you dictate | Nobody | Nothing. Audio is processed on the Mac and the text is pasted into your app. |
What is not there
No account, no login, no analytics, no tracking and no usage telemetry. The 7-day free trial is counted on your Mac and does not contact a server. If the license server cannot be reached, a licensed app keeps working for a 14 day grace period.
Languages
Dictation works in over 100 languages through the multilingual Whisper model, auto-detected or pinned in the settings. The app itself is available in 11 languages: German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian and Simplified Chinese.
Requirements and price
macOS 26 (Tahoe) or newer, Apple Silicon. 7 days free without an account, then 19 USD once, with free updates and a 14-day refund. Download from talkingkey.com. The legal text is in the privacy policy.