Privacy policy

Last updated 28 October 2026. Speakhold is a free, open-source Mac app made by Wild Interactive Limited, Wellington, New Zealand.

What Speakhold collects

Nothing. There is no account, no sign-in, no analytics, no crash reporting, and no server operated by us. The app does not phone home.

Your audio

Dictation: the microphone is captured only while your hotkey is held (or while hands-free lock is on), converted to 16 kHz mono, transcribed in-process by Whisper on your Mac, and discarded. Meetings: your microphone and the Mac's audio output are written to a temporary file on your Mac while the recording runs, transcribed on-device, and deleted once the notes are written. If writing the notes fails, the recording is kept in the temporary folder so nothing is lost, and the notification says where.

Your text

Transcripts and meeting notes are saved only on your Mac: dictation history in the app's support folder, meeting files in ~/Documents/Speakhold Meetings or the folder you choose. You can delete them at any time.

When text leaves your Mac

Only if you choose the Claude engine. Then the transcript text (never audio) is sent to Anthropic, either through the API with your own key, or through Claude Code installed on your Mac under your own Claude login. Anthropic's handling of that text is governed by their terms, not ours. Apple Intelligence cleanup and notes run on-device and send nothing.

Downloads the app makes

On first launch Speakhold downloads the speech model (about 630 MB) from WhisperKit's public model repository on Hugging Face. Optional Parakeet and speaker models are downloaded the same way on first use. These are file downloads; no personal data is sent.

Permissions

Microphone (dictation and meetings), Accessibility (to paste where your cursor is), System Audio Recording Only (meetings, macOS 14.2+), Calendar read-only (to name a meeting from the event happening now, optional), and Notifications (to tell you when notes are ready). Each is asked for when first needed and can be revoked in System Settings.

Children

Speakhold is a general-purpose tool and not directed at children.

Changes and contact

This page changes when the app does; the date at the top moves. Questions: open an issue at github.com/sturzael/speakhold/issues.

Try it

Free · MIT · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · brew install --cask sturzael/tap/speakhold

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