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Does live transcription on a Mac work offline, and is it private?
With Live Transcript, yes. It turns speech into text on your Mac with Apple Speech or Whisper, so captions keep working without a connection and audio never leaves your Mac. History and its search stay on your Mac too. Transcript text goes online only if you ask a cloud AI provider you picked about a session, and then only to that provider.
Live Transcript isn’t out yet: the download button on the home page starts working on release day.
What uses the network, and when
The first time: Whisper models download from Hugging Face when you first use one, and macOS may download language files for Apple Speech or for translation. Activating a license needs an internet connection.
Now and then: the app checks in with the license service when it’s online, and keeps working through long stretches without a connection.
Only if you choose: summaries and questions sent to a cloud AI provider (Claude, OpenRouter or a server elsewhere), and Apple Notes export, which syncs however you’ve set Notes up. With Apple’s on-device model, or a server on your Mac such as Ollama or LM Studio, summaries stay on your Mac.
What the license service keeps
A license is a key, with no account. The license service keeps a one-way hash of the key, the plan, and for each activated Mac an anonymous device ID, its model name and when it was activated and last seen. Never your name, email address, IP address or anything you transcribe. The full list is on the privacy page.
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Other questions
- How do I get live captions for any audio on a Mac?
- How do I transcribe my Mac’s system audio without BlackHole or a virtual audio device?
- How do I caption a video call or a video in my browser on a Mac?
- How do I find what was said in something I listened to last week?
- How do I translate a conversation live between two languages on a Mac?