Privacy and terms

Last updated October 31, 2026

The demo on this site

When you hold the button, your browser records your voice. The clip goes to our server, which passes it to Groq to turn it into text, and the text comes back to your browser.
We don’t keep your audio or the text. Groq handles the clip under its privacy policy.
To give each visitor 5 free minutes a month, we keep one small counter: how many seconds you’ve used this month. It’s filed under a code made from your IP address with a secret key, so the address itself is never stored and can’t be worked out from the code. The counter isn’t used for anything else, and it’s deleted when the month ends.
Like any website, our host Vercel sees your IP address to deliver the pages and to block too many requests in a row.
No cookies, no analytics, no ads. Your light or dark mode choice is saved only in your browser.
The demo is for people 18 and over. Please don’t say anything private or sensitive into it.

You sign in with Google. Google tells us your name, your email address and an account number; we never see your Google password.
We keep those, the date you joined, the last time your app checked in, and whether premium is on for you. They’re stored in our database at Supabase, in the United States.
We use them only to sign you in and to turn features on for you. We don’t sell them, share them or send you marketing email.
Your sign-in stays on your computer as a random key; we keep only a scrambled copy of it. Signing out ends it.
To delete your account, open an issue on GitHub (don’t write your email there). We’ll tell you how to confirm it’s you, then remove everything.

It runs on your computer. Apart from checking your account and the Premium features below, it sends us nothing: no audio, no text.
Your audio goes straight from your computer to the service you choose (Groq, OpenAI or your own server), using your own key, or stays on your computer in offline mode. That service’s privacy policy and terms apply, and you accept them when you create your key.
Your key is saved in a settings file on your computer and is sent only to that service (for Premium, through our server to Groq, as below).
New installs keep your dictated text in a history file on your computer for 7 days, never the audio, so you can find it again. It stays on your computer. Turn it off or clear it in the settings.
Premium features send our server the text they work on: your dictation; or the text you selected and what you said to change it; or, for the learning dictionary, your dictation and your word list. Our server passes it with your own Groq key to Groq, which processes it, and sends the result back to the app. We don’t store the text or the key.
The install command on this site downloads the uv installer from Astral, the open-source app from GitHub and our private package from this site.
Every 10 minutes the app asks this site whether there’s a new version. You can turn this off in the settings. Offline mode downloads the speech model from Hugging Face once.

The open version from GitHub has no account and sends us nothing. It asks GitHub for new versions, and your audio goes only to the service you choose.

The site and the demo are free and provided as is. They can change, run out of free minutes or stop at any time.
Don’t try to get around the limits or overload the demo, and don’t record other people without their permission.

The base of hold-dictate, everything in the GitHub repository, is free, open-source software under the MIT License. It’s provided as is, without any warranty.
The version you install from this site adds a private package with the account and the Premium features. That package is free to use but it isn’t open source.
Groq, OpenAI, Slack, Gmail and WhatsApp are trademarks of their owners. hold-dictate isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by them; their names and app marks only show where it works.

Questions or requests: open an issue on GitHub.