For work you can't upload
Journalists protecting sources, lawyers drafting privileged notes, clinicians and researchers handling sensitive conversations: when the recording must not leave the room, on-device is the only acceptable answer.
Private
Private voice-to-text for Mac
Private voice-to-text for Mac means your audio is transcribed on your machine and never uploaded. oto has no account, no telemetry, and no data collection, so there's nothing on our side to breach: nothing ever arrives in the first place.
$8 once
Offline by default
No account
Privacy by architecture
Private because it can't be otherwise.
Most apps promise not to look at your data. oto is built so there's no data to look at.
No account, no telemetry
oto never asks who you are, never phones home with usage data, and never builds a profile. Your transcripts live on your Mac, under your control.
Keys stay in your Keychain
If you choose an optional cloud engine, your API keys are stored in the macOS Keychain. The system encrypts them; we don't handle them and they never touch a server of ours.
How it works
Everything stays on the machine.
1. Speak
Press your hotkey in any app. Your microphone feeds oto directly, and nothing streams to a server.
2. Transcribe locally
Local engines like Whisper and Parakeet v3 turn speech into text on your own hardware.
3. Keep it
Text lands at your cursor; history is stored locally where you can search, export, or delete it.
One honest caveat: if you deliberately switch on a bring-your-own-key cloud engine, audio goes to that provider under your key. oto says so plainly and ships with all of them off.
Common questions
Trust, but verify.
How can I verify nothing leaves my Mac?
Turn Wi-Fi off and keep dictating; it works identically. Or watch oto with a network monitor like Little Snitch: with cloud engines off, there's no audio traffic to see.
Is there any analytics or crash reporting?
No app telemetry and no data collection. The app checks for updates, and that's the extent of its conversation with the internet.
Your voice. Your hardware. Your rules.
Voice-to-text that treats your audio like it's none of our business, because it isn't. $8 once.
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