Your voice, and where it goes.

SayControl is a macOS dictation app made by Sorower Hossan. This policy covers the app and the website at https://www.saycontrol.com. Write to support@saycontrol.com with anything about it.

Everything the app makes stays on your Mac: in a folder in your home directory (~/.config/sayctrl), and your sign-in in your Mac’s Keychain. We cannot see any of it, and the app never sends it anywhere unless you choose to include it in a support email.

• Your transcripts: the history of what you dictated, which you can clear from Settings.
• Recordings: the audio of your recent dictations, kept on your Mac so you can replay a clip. They are never uploaded anywhere. The app keeps your latest 1,000 clips (or 1 GB, whichever comes first) and deletes older ones; you can turn recording off or delete them all from Settings → Privacy.
• Your dictionary, phrases, tones, shortcuts and settings.
• A log of what the app did: when it listened, for how long, and what went wrong. It notes how many words you said, never the words themselves, and it stays small by replacing its oldest lines.

Dictation runs in the cloud. When you dictate, your audio is sent through SayControl’s servers to a speech-recognition service, which returns the words; the transcript is then sent to a language model for the AI pass (cleanup, tones, command mode), which returns the cleaned text. That is the whole round trip. We do not keep your audio or your transcripts on our servers: they pass through to produce the result and are not stored.

The work is done by third-party speech-recognition and language-model providers, which we choose and may change to keep the service fast and reliable. We only use providers whose API terms prohibit using customer audio and text to train their models, and every one of them is reached through our servers, never directly from your Mac.

Your dictionary’s words travel with the audio as spelling hints. Two settings send more than that, and both have a switch in Settings → General:

• Read the screen for names skims the front window for names and jargon and sends a short list of them (a couple of dozen words at most) with the audio, as spelling hints. It is on by default so names come out right; turn it off and nothing on screen is read.
• Command mode sends the text you have selected, so it can be rewritten the way you asked. It only happens when you hold the command keys and ask.

Signing in with Google gives us your name, email address and profile picture. Signing up with an email address gives us that address, your name and a password, which we keep only as a salted one-way hash. We keep these so your plan follows you across Macs.

We also record how you use the service: how much you dictate (words, speaking time, and when), which features you use (the AI pass, command mode, the agent voice and the rest), and what each of those costs us to run. We use it to operate SayControl, to measure the plans, and to make the app better. It never includes your audio or the text of your dictations.

Payments are handled by Paddle, our merchant of record. Paddle collects your payment details and handles tax and receipts under its own privacy policy. We never see your card number. We receive a record that the purchase happened, for which plan, and your email address.

The app also sends a device identifier with its requests: a one-way hash of your Mac’s hardware ID, which cannot be turned back into it. We keep it with the record of your dictation, so the Free plan’s 2,000 words a week belong to the Mac as well as the account, however many accounts sign in on it.

Once a day the app asks cdn.sayctrl.com whether a newer version exists. That request carries the app’s version and your macOS version so it can be answered, and no identifier of you.

When you are signed in, the app also renews your sign-in and checks your plan with api.saycontrol.com from time to time. Those requests carry your sign-in and the device identifier above. If you signed in with Google, the app downloads your profile picture once from Google’s image server to show it in the app.

“Report a problem” in Settings → Help composes an email to us with a diagnostics file: your app and macOS versions, which model you use, and the log lines that say what the app did and when. The text of your dictations is left out of it on purpose. You see the email before it sends.

The website keeps a small note in your browser’s local storage: a random id, when you first arrived and from which site, the page you landed on and any campaign tags in the link you followed (such as utm_source), and the same for your latest visit. The note stays in your browser and is sent nowhere until you click Download for Mac. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes it.

When you click Download for Mac, the website sends us that note with the page and button you clicked and the version you are downloading. Our server adds your IP address, the approximate location derived from it (country, region, city and network), your browser’s user agent and language, and the time. We use this to count downloads and to learn which links bring people to SayControl. It is not linked to an account, and we do not sell or share it.

Account details: for as long as the account exists. Delete the account from Settings → Account in the app, or ask us to, and your name, email address, photo, password hash and sign-ins are erased at once. Purchase records we are required to keep for tax stay with Paddle and with us for as long as the law requires.

Usage records (how much you dictate, which features you use and what they cost, and the device identifier): kept after an account is deleted, with nothing left that names you, because the Mac’s free week is counted from them. They hold no audio and no text.

Audio and transcripts on cloud dictation: not kept at all, by us. The speech and language providers process them under their API terms, which limit retention to abuse monitoring and exclude training.

Download records from the website: a year, then deleted.

Support emails: for as long as needed to help you, then a year.

You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, have it corrected, or have it deleted, by writing to support@saycontrol.com. If you are in the UK or EU, these are your rights under the GDPR; we honour the same requests from everyone. Everything on your own Mac is already yours to read, copy or delete.

SayControl is not directed at children under 16, and we do not knowingly hold an account for anyone under that age.

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and a change that matters — a new provider, something new that leaves your Mac — is also mentioned in the release notes of the version that brings it.