Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 August 2026

Wave Speak turns your voice into text on your Mac, built around one principle: your voice never leaves your Mac.

The short version

• No data collected. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking, no ads.
• Speech is processed on your device. Your audio, transcripts, and files are never sent anywhere.
• Works offline. The three speech models ship inside the app, so dictation and file transcription run with the Mac offline. Nothing is downloaded to make them work.

Two editions

Wave Speak comes in two editions, and they differ in what they need from the network. Wave Speak is downloaded from the Mac App Store. Wave Speak Pro is downloaded from this site. Where a statement below applies to only one of them, it says so.

How your data is handled

Everything you give Wave Speak stays on your Mac and is never uploaded anywhere: your microphone audio, your transcripts, and any files you transcribe. This holds for both editions, and it holds for Pro's link transcription too: the audio is fetched to your Mac and transcribed there.

Every speech model runs offline on your Mac. All three are built into the app and work from the very first launch.

Working offline

Both editions do their work without a network. Dictation and file transcription run with the Mac offline, during the free trial and after it, because every speech model is already inside the app.

Wave Speak Pro needs the network for one feature only: transcribing from a link, which by its nature has to fetch the audio from somewhere. It also needs to be online for one moment, when a licence key is first activated. After that it keeps working offline: a licence check that cannot reach the network is treated as no answer, never as not valid.

When the app goes online

Wave Speak (App Store) goes online for one thing: Apple's App Store service confirming your purchase or free trial.

Wave Speak Pro goes online for the four things below, and nothing else.

• Licence checks. Your licence key is sent to Polar, the reseller that handles the purchase, to confirm that it is valid and to register this Mac against it. This happens when you activate the key, and once each time the app starts. Being offline never costs you access.
• Update checks. The app asks this site whether a newer version exists, and downloads it if you agree. Whether it checks on its own is asked on first launch and can be changed at any time in Settings. No information about your Mac is sent with the check.
• Transcribing a link. Only when a link is given to the app. The page is contacted to fetch its audio, and where a video already carries captions, those are read instead.
• Updating the bundled link tool. Pro includes yt-dlp, the open-source tool that fetches audio from links, and can update it from that project's public releases. A working copy ships inside the app, so this is a refresh, not a requirement.

None of these ever include your audio, your transcripts, or your files.

Purchases

Wave Speak (App Store). The free trial and one-time purchase are handled entirely by Apple through the App Store.

Wave Speak Pro. The purchase is handled by Polar Software, Inc., which acts as the merchant of record and is therefore the seller named on the receipt. Payment details are entered on Polar's own checkout page and are never seen by the app or by its developer. Polar issues the licence key and holds the email address used to buy.

A record of each issued licence is also kept by the developer: the licence key, the buyer's email address, the order number, and the date. It exists so that licences keep working if the reseller is ever replaced. It is not used to contact anyone and is not shared.

Permissions

• Microphone: to hear you while you dictate.
• Notifications (optional): brief status messages.
• Accessibility (Wave Speak Pro only): to place your transcript directly into whatever you are writing, and to recognise a hotkey made of a single key. It is used for those two things. What you type is not stored, and is not sent anywhere.

App Store privacy label

Wave Speak collects no personal data from anyone, so its App Store privacy label is "Data Not Collected." If this policy ever changes, this page and the date above will be updated.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Email [email protected]. The responsible operator and postal address are in the Impressum.