DictateSI is a native Mac voice dictation tool built for banks, insurance, law, and real estate, where data has to stay local. Transcription and AI cleanup both run on your Mac. No cloud, no API key. Deployable air-gapped.
Native Mac · under 10 MB (the leading cloud tool is ~800 MB) · No SaaS account required
To: J. Marsh, Underwriting
Re: Site visit notes, 412 Walnut
Property inspected at 09:14 on Monday. Roof in good repair, no visible settling on the south foundation. The applicant's stated use matches the structure: single-family with a detached garage converted to office.
Income verification on file
We built DictateSI because the dominant dictation product sends audio to the cloud, and the people we care about can't deploy it. DictateSI is engineered around the constraint instead.
On-device
Transcription runs locally via Whisper. Audio is never sent to AWS, OpenAI, or any third party. There's nothing to subpoena off our servers because we don't have them.
On-device AI cleanup
Grammar and tone cleanup runs on a small model bundled with DictateSI: no key, no cloud, works offline. The whole pipeline stays local. Prefer a cloud model? Connect the Anthropic, OpenAI or Azure account you already have. Either way, audio never leaves the machine.
Native
Real Swift, not Electron. Apple Developer-signed binary. Air-gapped install is supported. Your IT team can ship DictateSI with the same tools they ship the rest of your fleet.
DictateSI lives in your menu bar. Hold ⌃⌥Space anywhere in macOS (your email, a CRM, a spreadsheet) and dictate.
Audio is streamed to whisper.cpp running on the Apple Neural Engine. Nothing leaves your Mac. Latency stays under a second.
A small AI model running on your Mac cleans up filler words and punctuation: no key, no cloud, works offline. Say "number one, two, three" and you get a numbered list; "new paragraph" does what it says. (Prefer the AI account you already have? Connect it instead.) Domain vocabularies handle loan numbers, policy IDs, statute citations.
DictateSI is sold direct to mid-market employers. We start in Ohio and the broader Midwest, where we can put a person on the ground with your team during rollout.
Regional banks & credit unions
Loan officers and processors type the same paragraphs every day: borrower interviews, site visit notes, decision memos. DictateSI turns 25-minute dictation into a clean draft in 4.
Insurance
Adjusters dictate field reports, call summaries, and claim updates. DictateSI stays inside the carrier's environment, with no third-party data processor to vendor-vet.
Mid-sized law firms
Your attorneys already dictate. DictateSI replaces the cassette workflow with a tool partners trust: confidential, on-device, signed by you, deployed by your IT.
Real estate & title
Agents dictate listing notes, showing recaps, and settlement summaries from the car. DictateSI handles the transcription; your CRM gets the clean text.
Most professionals type about 40 words a minute and speak about 120. The same borrower memo, claim note, or client letter takes roughly a third of the time by voice. Across a department, that compounds fast. Run your own numbers:
Your team
Notes, memos, emails, documentation. Not meetings, not reading.
Salary plus benefits and overhead, per hour.
3.3 hrs
saved per person, per week
4,000 hrs
back across the team, per year
$180,000
of staff time, per year
How we compute this. Dictating at ~120 wpm produces the same text as typing at ~40 wpm in a third of the time, so each typing minute becomes roughly 40 seconds saved. Weekly figures assume 5 working days; yearly figures assume 48 working weeks. These are estimates to size the opportunity, not a promise. Adjust the sliders to your own numbers, and when our first pilots produce measured results, those will replace this arithmetic.
Pick the deployment model your security review will sign off on. We work with you and your IT team to make the rollout boring. That's the goal.
Apple Developer-signed binary. Drag to Applications. Use during evaluation or for solo practitioners.
Ship the signed app via Jamf, Kandji, Intune, or whatever your fleet uses. The stable signature keeps permission grants across updates, and a standard configuration profile pins cleanup to on-device, allow-lists backends, forces the audit log, or locks an approved endpoint. Sample profiles are in the deployment kit.
DictateSI runs with zero network access: pre-position the checksummed model files, keep on-device cleanup, and the machine never calls out. No telemetry, no update calls.
Deployment kit for your IT team: on-device-only profile, approved-endpoint profile, plain preference file, and the key reference with Jamf, Kandji and Intune steps.
One download. No account. Free while we're in beta; pricing arrives with v1.0.
DictateSI is a single native app: no SaaS dashboard, no cloud account.
Drag it into /Applications,
grant Microphone and Accessibility on first launch, and press
your hotkey to dictate.
Public beta · cryptographically signed by the developer · Apple notarization arrives with the 1.0 release
First launch: one-time step
Because this beta isn’t yet notarized with Apple, macOS will say it “could not verify” DictateSI the first time you open it. That’s expected:
You approve once per Mac. You can verify the signature yourself: codesign -dv /Applications/DictateSI.app
What’s new in 0.7.2
Full changelog →System
After download, drag DictateSI.app to your
/Applications
folder, then approve the one-time security prompt (see
“First launch” instructions). Grant Microphone and
Accessibility when DictateSI asks, and you’re dictating.
The app itself is tiny. Speech and on-device AI cleanup each fetch their model once on first use (Whisper 0.15 to 0.55 GB depending on your Mac, the cleanup model ~1.1 GB) and cache it locally; after that, everything runs offline. Prefer not to download a model? Use the optional cloud or Ollama backend instead.
Deploying DictateSI across a team or need an air-gapped install? Book a pilot and we'll set it up with you in person.
If your question isn't here, ask it directly. We'll answer the security and compliance questions in writing.
Nowhere. DictateSI records audio in memory, hands a 16 kHz PCM buffer to whisper.cpp running on-device, and discards the buffer. We don't write audio to disk by default, and there's no upload path in the binary.
Cleanup runs on-device by default: a small open-licensed model (Qwen2.5, Apache-2.0) runs on your Mac via embedded llama.cpp, so nothing is transmitted and it works offline. If you would rather use an AI account you already have, connect it: Anthropic with your own key, or OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, Mistral and any OpenAI-compatible gateway your IT team runs. Only the transcribed text, never the audio, goes to that provider under your account, and the audit log records every such send. Either way, audio never leaves the machine.
DictateSI keeps everything on the machine: transcription and AI cleanup both run on your Mac, and there is no upload path in the binary. Cloud dictation tools work the other way; Wispr Flow's own privacy page states that transcription always happens in their cloud. If your data can't leave the device, that difference is the whole decision. DictateSI is also a native app under 10 MB (theirs is ~800 MB) and needs no account.
Yes. The binary is Apple Developer-signed with a stable signature, so TCC grants (microphone, accessibility) persist across updates. Managed preferences work the standard way: push a configuration profile in the com.dictatesi.mac domain to pin cleanup to on-device, allow-list which backends people may pick, force the audit log on, turn local history off, or lock an approved endpoint. Users see "Managed by your organization" on locked controls. Sample profiles and the key reference are in the deployment kit linked on the security page.
DictateSI is Mac-first today. A Windows version that works the same way, with all processing on the machine, is planned: the speech and AI engines DictateSI is built on already run on Windows, so the privacy architecture carries over. If your fleet is mostly Windows, say so in the pilot form below; demand directly sets the timeline.
Turn on the audit log (Settings → Audit Log, off by default). Every dictation appends a hash-chained, metadata-only record: which cleanup backend ran and whether anything left the Mac, never the transcript. Export it to JSON or CSV and hand over the headline figure: off-device events: 0. Tampering with the log breaks the chain, and the built-in integrity check says so.
Free for individuals during the beta. Teams start with a founder-led pilot, and per-seat pricing is set together from what the pilot shows. See the pricing page for the full breakdown.
We're onboarding the first cohort of pilot customers across Ohio and the Midwest now. Book a call below.
We onboard pilot customers personally: we'll come to you, install on a couple of seats, train your team, and stay involved through the first month.
Based in Ohio. Working across the Midwest first.
A founder reads every inquiry. Expect a reply within a day.