Privacy Policy

Transcripts for iPhone and iPad Last updated: 15 August 2026

The short version

Transcripts collects nothing. It has no servers, no accounts, no analytics, and no advertising. It contains no networking code of any kind — not disabled, not optional: absent. Your recordings, transcripts, and settings stay on your device and in the folder you choose.

What the app stores, and where

• Audio recordings are written on your device as ordinary .m4a files.
• Transcripts are stored alongside them as plain text in a small .json file per recording.
• Settings (your chosen folder, app preferences) are stored in the app's own preferences on your device.

When you choose a destination folder, recordings are copied there. If that folder is inside a cloud service you already use — iCloud Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox — then that service syncs the files under its privacy policy and your account with them, exactly as it would for any other file you put in that folder. Transcripts is not party to that transfer; it writes a file to a folder your device has given it access to.

Speech recognition

Live transcription uses Apple's on-device speech recognition. Transcripts sets Apple's requiresOnDeviceRecognition flag, and additionally refuses to transcribe at all on a device that cannot recognize speech locally — in that case it turns live text off and tells you why, rather than falling back to server-based recognition. Your audio is never sent to Apple's speech servers, or anyone else's.

On devices with Apple Intelligence, summaries are generated by Apple's on-device foundation model. This also runs locally.

The overlay

The overlay (Mac, off by default) reads two things while a call is recording: the call's own transcript, and — when "Search my notes for answers" is on — the Markdown notes under your transcripts folder. Passages from both are put into prompts for the same local model that writes your summaries.

All of this happens on your Mac. No note, no transcript and no question leaves the machine, and the overlay makes no network requests of any kind. It is called out here because it is the one feature that reads your wider notes rather than just the recording in front of it, and you should know that before turning it on.

Microphone

Transcripts uses the microphone only while you are recording, and only after you grant permission through iOS. You can revoke it at any time in Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Microphone. Recording continues in the background so a capture survives the screen locking — this is the point of a pocket recorder, and iOS shows a persistent indicator whenever it is happening.

What is never collected

No personal information, no contacts, no location, no device identifiers, no usage analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifiers, and no tracking of any kind. Transcripts does not use third-party SDKs — it has no third-party dependencies at all.

This website

The apps collect nothing — that is a property of how they are built. The iOS app contains no networking code at all. The Mac app reaches the network in three places, none of them carrying your recordings: it checks whether a newer version exists, and it downloads the speaker-diarization and on-device language models once from Hugging Face. If you point it at a local Ollama server, that traffic never leaves your machine.

The website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics for page-view and performance metrics. Its browser script runs independently of the Google Analytics choice below and does not use analytics cookies or track people across websites. It measures the website, not your recordings, transcripts or activity in the Transcripts apps. Browser blocking can prevent measurement. See Cloudflare’s description of its data collection.

The website also uses Google Analytics only if you choose Allow analytics. Until then, the site does not load Google's analytics script or send analytics requests. No thanks leaves Google Analytics off. You can change your choice using Analytics choices in the footer. We also honor your browser's Global Privacy Control signal.

If you opt in, Google receives website usage information such as page views, download-button clicks, browser/device information and a referrer domain. This helps us understand how people find Transcripts and which download they choose. Google receives the network requests, including your IP address; this is not an anonymous or entirely local website feature. See Google's privacy information.

We use a dedicated Transcripts Google Analytics property. Advertising personalization and Google signals are disabled in the website tag. We omit URL query strings and fragments from the page address we send. Analytics cookies are limited to this website's hostname and expire after 90 days. Your analytics choice is remembered on this browser for 180 days. Withdrawing consent removes this site's GA cookies and stops future collection; it does not remove data already sent to Google.

No recordings, transcripts or app usage are sent to Google Analytics. This website measurement is separate from the Mac, iPhone and iPad apps.

Children

The Transcripts apps are not directed at children and do not collect their data. The website analytics described above apply to website visitors.

Credits

Speaker attribution on the Mac uses on-device diarization models from FluidInference, derived from pyannote, both under CC BY 4.0. They are downloaded once, run entirely on your Mac, and are used unmodified.

Your recordings are your responsibility

Recording laws vary by country and by state. Some jurisdictions require the consent of every participant before a conversation may be recorded. Transcripts gives you a recorder; deciding whether you may lawfully record a given conversation, and obtaining any consent required, is yours.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted here with a new date. Because the app collects nothing, changes are expected to be rare.

Contact

Questions about this policy: [email protected]

Everything above is a description of how the app is built, not a promise about how it is operated — there is no server to operate. If any of it ever stops being true, it will stop being true here first.

Transcripts is open source under the MIT licence. If you would rather check that than take our word for it, the source is at https://github.com/doughatcher/transcripts — and the iOS app contains no networking code, which is verifiable in the source and in the shipped binary alike.