The short version: Plume has no accounts and does not track what you do with it.
Your voice is transcribed by Apple's speech engine, on your Mac whenever your language's
on-device model is installed, and Plume never records it. Your transcribed text, with your
dictionary and the style for the app you're in, goes only to the AI provider you chose, under your own API key — or, if you subscribe to Plume Plus,
through our relay to the model, which passes it straight to the model and stores nothing.
Either way we never keep your words.
Your voice and your words
Plume never records your audio. Transcription
uses Apple's built-in speech recognition, on your Mac whenever an on-device model for
your language is installed. For languages without a local model, Apple's speech service
transcribes under Apple's
privacy terms. Plume itself never records, stores, or transmits audio.
Text goes only where you point it. To polish your words, Plume sends
the transcribed text over HTTPS to a model, together with your custom dictionary and the
style for the app you're in, so names and tone come out right. On your own API key it goes directly to
the provider you configured — Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI (ChatGPT), or Google (Gemini);
that request is between your Mac and your provider and does not pass through any server
of ours. On Plume Plus it is sent instead to our relay at
plumepen.com/api/clean, which passes it to Anthropic (Claude) on our key and
stores nothing: the text is held only in memory for the length of the request, and is
never written to a database or a log. Our host, Vercel, produces standard short-lived
request logs that record the request itself, not your words.
Their handling of it is governed by their terms:
Anthropic,
OpenAI,
Google.
Your data stays local. Your history, dictionary, styles, and settings
are stored only on your Mac; the dictionary and style travel with each polish request, as
above, and are never kept. Your API keys are stored in the macOS Keychain. Delete any of it
anytime — we couldn't recover it for you if we wanted to, because we never had it.
The app
No analytics, no tracking. The app contains no usage analytics and no crash
reporting. Nothing records what you dictate, which apps you dictate into, or how often you
use Plume. A Plume Plus request carries your license key, which
the relay checks with Polar; the relay’s rate limits count against a one-way hash of
that key, and the hash carries no name, email, or Polar account. Plume versions before
0.0.38 also send a random per-install identifier, which the relay ignores; version 0.0.38
and later don't send one.
Automatic updates. Plume periodically checks our update feed to see
whether a newer version exists. That check is a standard web request and includes your
app version; it contains no personal information or unique identifier.
What this Mac can do. Plume polishes your words on your own Mac where
macOS can do it, and uses a simpler fallback where it cannot. Which one you get depends on
your macOS version, your processor, and whether Apple’s on-device model is switched
on — and nobody publishes how common each case is. So that same update check carries
four short values: which of those paths this Mac can run, your macOS version (major and
minor only), whether the processor is Apple silicon or Intel, and the language you have set
Plume to dictate in. There is no identifier of any kind, no separate connection is opened,
nothing is kept on your Mac, and none of it describes anything you have dictated. We keep
running totals, never individual records. Switch it off under
Settings → Help Plume know which Macs it runs on and the update check carries
only the app version, exactly as it did before.
This website
Our site is static and sets no tracking cookies, so there's nothing to consent to.
Our hosting provider (Vercel) produces standard, short-lived server logs
(IP address, browser type) to run the service.
We use Vercel's privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics to count page visits and button
clicks in aggregate. It cannot identify you.
Changes and contact
If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date above. Questions:
support@plumepen.com.