Privacy

Last updated 6 August 2026

What you say

Hold the talk key and the sound goes into memory. The speech model on your Mac turns it into words. The sound is then deleted.

The sound is never written to disk. It is never uploaded. There is no server on the other end, because there is no other end. The model is a file in a folder on your Mac, and it runs on the Apple chip inside your computer.

This is not a setting you have to find. There is no cloud mode to turn on by accident. Slate was not built with one.

What is saved, and where

All of it is on your Mac, in ~/Library/Application Support/Slate, and nowhere else.

• Your history. The words you dictated, as text. You choose in Settings › History: keep it, keep one day of it, or keep none of it. There is a button to clear it now.
• Your notes. The things you saved on purpose by holding Shift with the talk key. These stay until you delete them.
• Your dictionary. The names and spellings you added yourself.
• Your settings and your totals. How many words, how long you spoke, how much time you saved.
• Your license record. The date you first ran Slate, and your license key if you have one.
• A log. A plain text file that helps with support questions. It stays on your Mac unless you choose to send it.

The speech models are in ~/Library/Application Support/FluidAudio/Models. You can open both folders and read every file in them. Delete them and Slate begins again with nothing. The support page explains how.

Passwords are a special case, and Slate handles them separately. See below.

The four internet connections

Here is the full list. What you say is not sent in any of them. They are about the software itself: getting it, checking a key, and updating it.

• 1. The speech model, once. About 600 MB, the first time you use Slate. It is downloaded from huggingface.co, which may redirect to their delivery network, so those are the names you would see in a network monitor. After it lands, dictation works with the Wi‑Fi off. Try it on a plane. Switching to the multilingual model fetches that one the same way.
• 2. Your license key, once. If you activate a key, Slate sends the key to the store to confirm it is real, along with a random tag. Your name, your email, and the name of your Mac are not sent. This happens on the day you activate and never again.
• 3. A check for a new version, only if you switch it on. Slate downloads one small file from this website that says what the newest version is. Nothing about you, your Mac, or anything you dictated goes with it. The switch is in Settings › About.
• 4. The new version itself, if you say yes. Nothing is installed without your agreement, and nothing is installed unless it is signed with Slate's own key.

That is four. There is no fifth.

One extra detail, for people who like detail. Slate is also built so that a version check will not start while the microphone is open. That changes nothing about your privacy, because what you say is not sent in that check either. It is there so that anyone watching their own network during a dictation sees exactly nothing, which is easier to trust than a paragraph.

Passwords

If you dictate into a password box, nothing is typed and nothing is saved to disk.

macOS has a lock for this, and it is switched on by the app you are typing into, not by Slate. When a password box is in front of you, macOS turns on something called secure input. While that is on, no other app can read your keystrokes or type for you. That includes Slate.

So Slate stops. The words are held in memory only, for two minutes, so that one paste is possible if the block was a mistake. They are never written to your history file. After the paste, or after two minutes, they are deleted. If they are put on the clipboard for that one paste, they are marked so that clipboard managers skip them.

The honest limit: this depends on the app you are typing into switching the lock on. Real password fields do. The macOS login window, Safari, Chrome, 1Password, and the password prompt in Terminal all do. An app that shows a password box without switching the lock on would be treated as an ordinary text box. That is rare, and there is no way to detect it from the outside.

Check it yourself

Please do. You should not have to take my word for it.

Turn off your Wi‑Fi. Once the speech model has downloaded, keep dictating. Everything works.

Run Little Snitch, LuLu, or Wireshark. These show every connection your Mac makes. Watch while you talk. There will be nothing.

Or open Terminal and paste this in the middle of a sentence:

lsof -i -a -p $(pgrep -x Slate)

That lists every network connection Slate has open. It comes back empty.

What Slate does not do

• No analytics service. No Google, no Meta, no Mixpanel, no Amplitude.
• No cookies on this website, and no tracking script on any page of it.
• No advertising. Nothing sold to anyone.
• No reading of what you type. Accessibility permission is used for two jobs: detecting the talk key, and placing text at your cursor. Every other keystroke passes through untouched.
• No system profile. The update tool built into Slate is able to report your Mac model, memory, and macOS version. That option is switched off.
• No crash reports sent anywhere.

Payments

Slate is free during early access, so there is nothing to pay and nothing to collect. When purchasing opens, the checkout is handled by the store, which is Lemon Squeezy. Your card details go to them, not to us, and their privacy policy covers that transaction. Slate itself only ever sends a license key to be checked.

This website

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from another company's servers. The one font file and every image are served from here.

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages. Like any web server, it records requests for pages and files, which includes your IP address and browser. That log belongs to GitHub and is covered by their privacy policy. We do not read it and cannot connect it to a person.

Children

Slate is not aimed at children, and it collects nothing from anyone of any age.

Your rights

There is no personal data of yours to request, correct, or delete, because none of it reaches us. Everything Slate keeps is in a folder on your Mac that you can open, read, and delete yourself.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and the release notes say so in plain words. The promise that what you say stays on your Mac is not going to change.

Contact

Questions about any of this go to contact@bluetomatostudio.com. A person reads it.