Plainly, it stays with you.

Aurator turns your speech into text with Apple’s speech model on your Mac. The text it pastes is tidied by Aurator’s own rules on your Mac, which take out sounds such as um and uh and tidy the spacing and punctuation. When Apple Intelligence is on and a dictation still has fillers or repeated words, Apple’s model on your Mac polishes the copy kept in your history a few seconds later. The coach, the dictionary and your voice commands work on your Mac too. None of this is sent to us, and we do not run a server that could receive it.

Your dictations and what Aurator keeps from them stay in one folder on your Mac, in your Library, Application Support, Aurator. That is your dictation history, with the words as you said them, the cleaned text, the app you dictated into, the language and how long you spoke, and also the Write for me pieces, voice edits and answers from Asking Aurator that you pasted or copied, your coaching lessons with the answers you spoke and the coach’s replies, your recordings, your notes, your voice guide, your skills, your personal dictionary and snippets, your app rules and a debug log. The log records events and counts, never the words you said. Window titles are not kept with your dictations. Your licence is kept in your Mac’s Keychain. The requests Aurator sends to Claude, to Deepgram and to our licence server are never written to a cache on your Mac. On a Mac that had Aurator 2.10 or earlier, the first time a later version runs it clears the window titles and the request cache those versions left, and moves your licence into the Keychain.

When your dictation key is a single key, such as Right Option, Aurator opens the microphone as soon as you hold that key on its own, a moment before the pill appears, so your first word is not cut off. For that moment the microphone light macOS shows in the menu bar is the only sign. What is heard then stays in memory on your Mac. If the key turns out to be part of a shortcut, it is dropped and nothing is sent anywhere. With Cloud chosen, it goes to Deepgram only once the press is a dictation, as its start.

Aurator does not listen in a password field. When an app has secure typing on as you start a dictation, as password prompts do, the dictation stays on your Mac and never goes to the cloud. While a dictation records, Aurator checks the field in front about four times a second. If a password field comes to the front, Aurator stops listening at once and keeps nothing, so nothing is pasted, copied or saved, and the same happens when a password field is in front as you stop. If secure typing comes on at any moment, as it does for a password prompt in Terminal, the whole dictation becomes private and stays private, even if secure typing goes off before you stop. With Cloud chosen, Aurator stops sending the sound to Deepgram as soon as it notices either one, within about a quarter of a second, and sound sent before that cannot be taken back. For a private dictation, Aurator drops what Deepgram made of it and transcribes the recording on your Mac instead. A private dictation is never saved to your history or your recordings, is never kept for Try Last Recording Again, and does not stay on your clipboard. When your Mac cannot transcribe it, nothing is pasted and nothing is kept.

The text goes back to the app and the field you were in when you started the dictation. If something else is in front when the text is ready, Aurator copies it instead of pasting it, and tells you, so it does not land in a window you did not mean. In an app that hides its windows and fields from macOS, only the app is checked.

Each time you dictate, Aurator reads up to 64 characters before the cursor and 32 after it, in the field you dictate into. It uses them only to fit your words to their place, whether a space goes before and after them, whether the first letter is a capital, and whether your closing full stop stays. It reads them once, on your Mac, as the text goes in, and then drops them. They are never saved, logged or sent anywhere. It never reads a password field, a field with secure typing on, or a terminal app, and it does nothing for a rewrite style, a voice edit, Write for me, or a private dictation. You can turn it off in Settings, under Match the text around the cursor.

Keep dictation on the clipboard, in Settings, leaves your last dictation on the clipboard after it is pasted, so you can paste it again if an app misses it. It is off on a new install, so your own clipboard comes back after each paste. A Mac that ran an earlier version and never changed it keeps it on. When Aurator puts a dictation on the clipboard to paste it, the dictation stays on this Mac and does not travel to your other devices through Universal Clipboard, and it is marked so clipboard history apps that follow the shared markers described at nspasteboard.org leave it out. An app that ignores those markers may still record it, as it would anything you copy. What you copy yourself, with Copy Last Transcript or the copy button in History, is an ordinary copy.

Something copied earlier is off until you turn it on in Settings, Writing, Commands. While it is on, Aurator keeps the text you copy, with the time and the name of the app you copied it in, so you can ask for it later. It keeps up to 200 copies, for 24 hours unless you choose 1 hour, 6 hours, 3 days or 7 days, in an encrypted file in your Aurator folder, whose key is kept in your Keychain. It never keeps pictures or files, a copy an app marks as private, anything copied in a password field or with secure typing on, or anything copied in a password manager such as Passwords or 1Password, and it leaves out text that looks like a one-time code, a key or a password, though it cannot spot every password. What it keeps is never sent anywhere, with Cloud on or off, is left out of backups, and is removed when its time is up, when you press Clear beside the setting, or with Delete All Data.

When you start with Aurator, you can also ask it to find a dictation in your history, to find and open a file or an app, which it looks for with Spotlight, or to work out maths and dates. These run on your Mac and send nothing. You can ask about the page open in Safari or Chrome, which Aurator reads, its title, address and text, only when you ask, or about a picture you copied. Without Cloud, Apple’s model on your Mac answers. With Cloud, what goes to Claude is listed under When you turn on Cloud. Answers about a page, a picture or a note are not kept in your history.

To pause music while you dictate, Aurator reads only whether something is playing, and pauses Music or Spotify with the permission macOS asks you for. To warn you when another dictation app could type your words twice, it reads the names of the apps running on your Mac. Nothing from either is sent, and Aurator keeps only which of those apps it has already told you about.

How long your history keeps dictations is up to you, in Settings, Privacy and data, under Keep dictations for. You can choose 1 day, 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 1 year, or forever, which is the setting until you change it. Starred dictations are always kept. Older dictations are removed from your Mac with their recordings, and dictations brought back from a backup are kept until you choose to remove them.

Aurator keeps the sound of each dictation so you can play it back in History. A new install keeps each recording for 30 days. In Settings you can choose 7 days, 90 days, until you delete them, or switch recording off. A Mac that already had recordings from an earlier version keeps them until you choose otherwise.

The Coach teaches through spoken lessons. You answer each question out loud, and your answer is heard on your Mac with Apple’s speech model, even with Cloud on. Its sound is recorded only while you answer and is never saved. Aurator keeps the words of each answer, the Coach’s reply and the better version, in your Aurator folder apart from your dictations, so lesson answers never count in your Aura Score and never show on the Dashboard, in History or in My Voice. Keep dictations for removes the words of older answers and keeps their numbers, so your progress stays. The better version is written on your Mac with Apple Intelligence, or by Claude when Cloud is on with your Anthropic key, as listed under When you turn on Cloud.

The Coach reads its messages aloud with your Mac’s own voices, and stops the moment you start dictating. Read aloud is on unless VoiceOver was running the first time, and the Read aloud switch in a lesson turns it off.

The coach does not use recordings. It works from the words and the timing of each dictation, so switching recording off changes nothing there.

You can save a short phrase with the text it stands for, an address or a signature for example, and say the phrase to put the text in. Snippets are kept in your Aurator folder with your dictionary, and they are never sent to the cloud, since a dictation with a snippet skips the rewrite styles. Your history keeps a note that a snippet was used, never its text, and Delete All Data removes your snippets with your dictionary. A backup holds your snippets as you typed them, like the rest of your data. Please do not keep passwords or keys in a snippet.

You can export your dictionary and your snippets to a file that you keep, and import a list of words. Making the file sends nothing anywhere. Imported words join your dictionary, so when you turn Cloud on they help the cloud service hear them, as your other dictionary words do.

Help’s articles are kept inside the app, so they work offline, and searching them sends nothing anywhere. A link in an article opens in your browser only when you click it.

After about 20 seconds of steady typing, a small pill can remind you to hold your dictation key next time. To know you are typing, Aurator reads only how long ago a key went down, never which key, and keeps nothing of what you type. Don’t show again on the pill, or Remind me to dictate in Settings, Dictation, turns it off.

The first time Aurator starts on a new Mac, it plays a short welcome voice once. It is a sound file inside the app, so nothing is sent or recorded, and Aurator remembers on this Mac that it played.

You can delete one dictation, with its recording, from History. Delete All Data in Settings removes every dictation, every recording, your Write for me pieces, voice edits and answers, your coaching lessons, your voice guide, your personal dictionary, your app rules, the skills you wrote and the debug log, and the starter skills come back. It also removes every note with its recordings and transcript, how you sorted apps into kinds, your own start and stop sounds, and what Something copied earlier kept. Your settings, your licence and your cloud keys stay. To remove everything, quit Aurator, delete the Aurator folder in your Library, Application Support, delete the file dev.ndmr.aurator.plist in your Library, Preferences, which holds your settings, and delete the folder dev.ndmr.aurator in your Library, Caches. Your licence and any cloud keys stay in your Keychain until you remove them in Keychain Access, where their names start with dev.ndmr.aurator.

A backup is a zip file you save wherever you choose. It holds your history, which includes your dictionary, app rules and coaching lessons, your recordings, your notes with their recordings and transcripts, your voice guide, your skills, your own start and stop sounds and your settings. A note of a call can hold the voices and words of the other people on it. It never holds your licence, and never what Something copied earlier kept.

Cloud is off until you choose it in Settings and add a key from your own account. Your keys stay in your Mac’s Keychain. With a Deepgram key, Deepgram receives the sound of each dictation while you speak, the language you chose, the words you added to your personal dictionary and the word Aurator, so it can spell them your way. Replacements you set up, window titles and app names are never sent. When you save a Deepgram key, with Cloud on for every app or for one app by its rule, Aurator asks Deepgram once whether it accepts the key, so Settings can tell you whether it works. That request carries the key and nothing else, no sound and no text.

With an Anthropic key, Claude, made by Anthropic, receives text for these ten things and nothing else.

• Rewrite styles sends the dictation you just made and the style’s instructions, when you use a style such as Polished email, Bullet points or one you wrote.
• Voice editing sends the draft a style wrote, what you said to change it, and when you name one of your skills in what you said, that skill, up to 20,000 characters of it.
• Asking Aurator sends what you asked, when you start with Aurator or hold the edit key, any text you selected, your first name, your voice guide and the skill you named.
• Write for me sends your spoken request and any change you say to its draft, the draft itself, your first name, your voice guide and the skill you named.
• Building My Voice sends your first name and up to about 45,000 characters of dictations from the last 180 days, including dictations made while Cloud was off. Aurator asks you before the first time.
• Coach lessons sends the answer you just spoke in a lesson and the lesson’s goal, to write a better version of it.
• Asking about the page you are reading sends your question, the questions you asked before it about the same page, and the title, link and text of the front tab in Safari or Chrome, up to 200,000 characters, when you ask Aurator about the page and Cloud is on for that browser.
• Asking about a copied picture sends your question, the picture you copied, made smaller, and any text your Mac read in it, when you ask Aurator about it and Cloud is on for the app in front.
• Web search sends your question, and the questions you asked before it in the same window, when you turn on Web search in Settings and ask Aurator to search the web. Claude searches the web for them. No selected text, voice guide or location is sent.
• Notes, their summaries, asking about them and editing their text sends the note’s transcript, including what other people said in the recording, your own notes in it, its summary and your questions, when Aurator writes the note’s summary or you ask about the note, with Cloud on for the app the note was recorded in and every call app running then, or for every app for a note you wrote. When you change a note’s own text by voice, ask Aurator in the note or rewrite it with a skill, the text you change, what you said and a skill you named go to Claude under the same choice. Before the first recording goes to Claude, Aurator asks you once.

Aurator never uses your words to train a model, on your Mac or anywhere else. With Cloud on, every request that carries your audio asks Deepgram to keep it out of Deepgram’s model training.

The ordinary cleanup never uses the cloud, and the coach uses it only to write the better version of a lesson answer. Unless Cloud is chosen and an Anthropic key is saved, the rewrite styles, voice editing, Write for me, Building My Voice and a lesson’s better version run on your Mac, when Apple Intelligence is on. If Deepgram fails during a dictation, Aurator finishes it on your Mac. When your Mac cannot transcribe that language, Aurator keeps the recording for Try Last Recording Again, in Aurator’s menu in the menu bar, as it does with any recording it could not transcribe. It is kept in memory, and saved on your Mac only when Keep audio recordings and Save transcripts are both on in Settings. Trying it again sends it to Deepgram again while Cloud is still chosen and a Deepgram key is saved. If Claude fails on a rewrite style, a voice edit, Write for me or a lesson’s better version, Apple’s model on your Mac takes over when Apple Intelligence is on. Building My Voice with Claude has no such fallback. If Claude fails, no voice guide is made and you can try again. Deepgram and Anthropic handle what they receive under the terms of your own account with them, including how long they keep it. None of it is ever sent to us.

Aurator checks its licence with our own server at tryaurator.app. It does this when you activate a key, when you upgrade or free a Mac, and about once a day after that. It sends these things, and never your dictations.

• Your licence key.
• A random id Aurator made for this Mac, so the key knows which Macs hold it.
• Your Mac's name as set in System Settings, for example Sarah's MacBook Air, so you can tell your Macs apart when you move the key.
• A one-way hash made from this Mac's hardware id and your key, so it is different for every key and cannot be turned back into the hardware id. It ties the signed licence the app keeps to this Mac, and our server keeps a short form of it with the Mac's entry, so one Mac counts once and a copied seat is refused.
• Whether Aurator has asked iCloud for your account id yet, which tells our server the app is new enough for the every Mac plan.
• On the every Mac plan only, a one-way hash of the private id iCloud gives Aurator for your Apple account. It carries no name and no email, and Aurator never sees your Apple ID.
• The plan you choose when you upgrade.
• A random one-time number made for each activation and check. The signed answer repeats it, so Aurator can tell a new answer from an old one played back. Our server does not keep it.

We keep your key, the id and name of each Mac that holds it, the date each one joined, a short form of each Mac’s hardware hash, and on the every Mac plan the account hash, with your purchase record at Stripe, our payment provider. Someone who enters your key when it has no free Mac left is shown the names of the Macs that hold it, so they can free one, so please keep your key to yourself. To have a Mac’s name removed, click Deactivate this Mac in Settings, Licence on that Mac, or write to us.

To stop abuse, our server also counts these licence requests, by the network address each one comes from, and a request that adds or removes a Mac by a one-way hash of the key as well. The counts are cleared after about a day.

Updates. Aurator checks for new versions by reading a small file from raw.githubusercontent.com, GitHub’s file server, and installs a new version only when you agree. That request carries nothing about you beyond what any web request carries, such as your network address. The app itself, and each update, downloads from GitHub too, which sees your network address as any download does.

tryaurator.app counts page views with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies. Before a view is counted, the address is cut back to the page itself, so nothing after a question mark is sent, apart from three campaign tags, such as utm_source=x, which say which post or email a visit came from. A tag with an email address, or anything that looks like an id, is dropped. Admin pages, and the pages that show your licence key, start an upgrade, send your key again, confirm your email or unsubscribe you, are not counted at all.

On your first visit the home page plays a short film about Aurator, which you can skip. So that it plays only once, your browser keeps a note that you have seen it, in the browser's own storage on your device. The note holds nothing else, is not a cookie and is never sent to us. Clearing this site's data in your browser removes it. If you hide the small Watch the film button in the corner, your browser keeps a note of that the same way, only until you close the tab.

The home page shows a small MakerMap badge, an image loaded from makermap.lol. Like any site that serves an image, MakerMap receives your network address and browser details when it loads, but not the address of the page you are on. No MakerMap code runs on this site.

When you download Aurator we ask for your first name and your email, and if you like, what you plan to use it for. We also note the website that sent you here, its address only. We email you the download link and the setup steps. If you confirm your address from that email, we also send three short emails over the ten days after you download, one tip for your first days, a note before your free week ends, and one last note after it.

If you come from an ad or a campaign link, we note which campaign brought you, the campaign tags in the address of the first page you open, such as utm_source and utm_campaign, and which kind of ad click id was there, such as gclid, never the id itself. Your browser keeps them for the visit in its own storage, until you close the tab. They are sent with the download form, and kept with your email in our database, or sent when you start a checkout, and kept with your order at Stripe.

If you ask us to tell you when Aurator is ready to download, join the Windows waitlist, ask for release notes or enter a giveaway, we keep your email, and for a giveaway your name if you give it. If you asked to be told when Aurator is ready, we email you once, when you can download it. When you buy, Stripe takes the payment and passes us your name, your email and the plan you bought. We never see your card.

These details are kept in our database at Neon, our emails go out through Resend, the site is hosted by Vercel, and payments go through Stripe. We do not sell your details or share them with anyone else.

To stop abuse, the site counts recent requests in our database. The forms, the checkout, the licence checks from the app, the bug reports it sends and the key lookups are each counted by the network address they come from, stored as it is or as the block of addresses it belongs to, and email addresses and licence keys are counted in a one-way hashed form. Counts more than a day old are cleared now and then as the site handles requests, so a network address usually stays in that table for about a day, and sometimes a little longer.

We keep these details until you ask us to delete them. Write to hello@tryaurator.app from the address you used and we delete your record, your giveaway entries and your place on our email lists. If you had unsubscribed, we keep only a one-way hashed form of your address, so we never email you again. Copies of emails already sent stay in Resend’s sending logs for as long as Resend keeps them, and your purchase record stays at Stripe for our accounts.

Every welcome and trial email, the email that confirms a release notes signup, and the email that tells you Aurator is ready, has a one click unsubscribe, and once you unsubscribe we stop, and we take you off the release notes list at Resend too. Licence key emails have no unsubscribe, because they only answer your purchase.

Aurator is made by ndmr.au and sold by Digital Products, a small business in Queensland, Australia. When this page says we, it means that business. The details the website keeps are stored in our database at Neon, in Sydney, Australia. Neon, Vercel, Resend and Stripe are based in the United States and may handle them there and in other countries.

We use your email to send what you asked for, the download and the emails you confirmed, and your purchase details to give you your key and keep our accounts. You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it or delete it, or ask us to stop using it, by writing to hello@tryaurator.app. If you are not happy with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, or to the data protection authority where you live.

If anything here is unclear, please write to hello@tryaurator.app. We read every message and we will answer plainly. Buying, refunds and upgrades are explained in our terms of sale.