LocalFlow for Mac

Why LocalFlow keeps your voice on your Mac

9 November 2026

Hold Fn, speak, let go, and your words are typed at your cursor about a tenth of a second later. The speech is turned into text on your Mac, so your voice never leaves it.

What happens when you talk

Speech is turned into text by a model that runs on your Mac. The audio is processed while you talk and is not saved to disk or sent anywhere. We have no server that receives it.

We do not keep your transcripts either. The text goes to your clipboard or your cursor and nowhere else.

LocalFlow listens only while you hold Fn. The listening bar under the notch shows when it is on.

It works with Wi-Fi off

Dictation needs no connection. The internet is used only to set up: the speech model downloads once (about 450 MB) and your license activates once. After that, it works offline.

The few times LocalFlow does use the internet

The privacy page lists every one. In short:

• Speech model download. The first time you open the app it downloads the model from Hugging Face. They see the request, including your IP address, as any website does. No audio is involved.
• License check (the version from this website). The app sends the license key and a one-way fingerprint of your Mac once, then about once a week, to check the license is still valid. The fingerprint is a SHA-256 hash of the Mac’s hardware ID, so it cannot be turned back into the ID. Nothing about your speech or text is sent. LocalFlow Lite does not do this.
• Update check. Now and then the app asks this site for a file called appcast.xml to see whether a newer version exists.
• Buying. “Buy…” opens the Buy page on this site. Payment is handled by Paddle, the seller of record, and we never see card details.

What we keep when you buy

Your purchase email, the Paddle order and customer numbers, the license key and the date it was created, one-way fingerprints of up to 2 of your Macs, and whether the license was refunded. We do not store your card, your billing address or your name.

We never sell your information and never share it for advertising. There are no ads, no ad trackers and no marketing lists.

Why it asks for Accessibility

macOS only lets an app watch for the Fn key and paste into other apps if you allow it. LocalFlow uses the permission for those two things and nothing else.

Check it yourself

Turn Wi-Fi off, hold Fn and talk. The app also keeps a short timing log on your Mac (~/Library/Logs/LocalFlow-timing.log) that holds only stage times and a character count, never your words.