What Resonant Doesn't Do With Your Voice

Most voice dictation apps send your audio to a remote server. Your voice — your medical notes, legal briefs, private messages, proprietary code — travels through infrastructure you don't control. Some apps say they don't store it. Some do. Some gate privacy behind enterprise pricing. We took a different approach: we made it structurally impossible for us to access your data in the first place. What Resonant doesn't collect Resonant processes speech recognition entirely on your Mac using on-device AI models. There is no server, no cloud endpoint, no WebSocket stream. Your audio never leaves your machine. This means we don't collect: - Your voice recordings. Audio is processed in real-time by local models and immediately discarded after transcription. We never receive, store, or have access to your voice. - Your transcripts. The text output from your dictation stays on your device. We have no mechanism to retrieve it. - Your screen context. Resonant does not read your screen, your clipboard, your active window text, or any application context. Some competitors use "context awareness" to scrape the text on your screen — we don't. - Usage telemetry on your content. We don't track what you dictate, which words you use, or what apps you dictate into. Does Resonant use my voice for AI training? No. This is not a policy decision — it's an architectural one. We cannot train on your voice data because we never have access to it. There is no "Privacy Mode" toggle because privacy is not optional. There is no enterprise tier required to unlock data protection. Every user gets the same guarantee: your data stays on your device. For comparison, several cloud-based voice dictation services reserve "Zero Data Retention" for enterprise plans. Standard users on those platforms contribute their voice and transcripts to model training under broad "Service Improvement" clauses. We think that's the wrong tradeoff. The Proton model: privacy through architecture We take direct inspiration from Proton — the organization behind ProtonMail, ProtonVPN, and Proton Drive. Proton's philosophy is that privacy should be enforced by engineering, not by policy. ProtonMail can't read your emails because they're end-to-end encrypted before Proton's servers ever see them. The privacy guarantee is structural. Even if Proton were compelled by a court order, they cannot produce data they don't have. Resonant applies the same principle to voice. We can't listen to your dictation because the audio never leaves your Mac. We can't hand over transcripts to a third party because we don't have them. We can't train a model on your voice because the data never reaches our infrastructure. This isn't a premium feature. It's the foundation. How it works technically Resonant bundles state-of-the-art speech recognition models that run directly on Apple Silicon. The Neural Engine in M-series chips provides the compute needed to run these models at speeds that rival cloud services — without a network connection. When you speak: 1. Audio is captured by your Mac's microphone. 2. The on-device model processes the audio in real-time. 3. Text appears in your active application. 4. The audio buffer is immediately discarded. No step in this process involves a network request. Resonant works offline, on airplanes, and in air-gapped environments. The only network activity is optional: license validation and crash reporting (which never includes voice data or transcription content). Who this matters for If you work with sensitive information, the architecture of your tools matters as much as their features. - Attorneys drafting privileged communications need assurance that their dictation isn't traversing third-party infrastructure. - Healthcare professionals documenting patient encounters need tools that don't create HIPAA liability through cloud transmission. - Journalists protecting sources cannot afford voice data sitting on a vendor's server, subject to subpoena. - Software engineers dictating proprietary logic and code need certainty that their IP won't end up in a training corpus. - Therapists and counselors taking session notes handle some of the most sensitive content imaginable. For all of these users, Resonant offers something most cloud services cannot: the absence of data — not the promise of its protection, but the structural impossibility of its collection. The privacy hierarchy in voice dictation Not all privacy claims are equal. Based on architecture, voice dictation tools fall into a clear hierarchy: Structural privacy — the tool never transmits your data. Privacy is enforced by code and physics. The vendor has nothing to surrender, sell, or train on. This is where Resonant sits. Contractual privacy — the tool transmits your data to the cloud but promises to delete it. Privacy depends on the vendor honoring their terms, their sub-processors (OpenAI, Anthropic) honoring theirs, and the legal jurisdiction in which the data is processed. Gated privacy — the tool retains and processes your data by default. Privacy features like "Zero Data Retention" or "Privacy Mode" are available only on enterprise plans. Standard users contribute data under "Service Improvement" clauses. We believe the first tier is the only one that provides a genuine guarantee. Contracts can be amended. Policies can change. Servers can be breached. But data that never leaves your device cannot be compromised at the vendor level. Frequently asked questions Does Resonant record my voice? No. Audio is processed in real-time by on-device models and immediately discarded. Resonant has no recording functionality and no mechanism to store or transmit audio. Is my dictation used to train AI models? No. Resonant never has access to your voice data or transcripts. We cannot use data we don't have. Does Resonant send any data to the cloud? Dictation is 100% local. The only network activity is optional license validation and automated crash reports (via Sentry), which contain only error diagnostics — never voice data, transcripts, or personal content. Does Resonant read my screen or clipboard? No. Resonant does not use "context awareness" features that scrape screen text, clipboard contents, or active window data. Your screen content is not accessed. Do I need an enterprise plan for privacy? No. Every Resonant user — free or paid — gets the same privacy architecture. There is no "Privacy Mode" to enable and no tier-gated data protection. Can Resonant comply with HIPAA, GDPR, or similar regulations? Resonant's architecture inherently minimizes regulatory risk because no Protected Health Information (PHI) or personal data is transmitted or stored by Resonant. All data processing happens on the user's own device, making the user the sole data controller for their voice and transcript data. What happens if Resonant receives a legal request for my data? We cannot produce data we don't have. Voice recordings and transcripts never reach our infrastructure. A subpoena to Resonant would yield nothing because there is nothing to yield.