Privacy
What is collected, and by whom.
Last updated September 27, 2026. High5 Labs LLC, 4030 Wake Forest Road, Ste 349, Raleigh, NC 27609.
The app
Typing Optional runs entirely on your Mac. Audio, transcripts, the learned dictionary and any screen context stay on the machine and are not transmitted anywhere. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no account and no sync.
Recognition runs on the Neural Engine and cleanup runs on an on-device model, so the app functions with no network connection available. That is the check worth making: turn off Wi-Fi and use it.
The first time it runs, the app downloads its speech model from huggingface.co, once. The request carries no audio, no text and nothing about you beyond what any web request carries (your IP address).
After that, the one request the app makes is an update check: once a day it fetches a small file from typingoptional.com listing the newest version. That request carries no audio, no text and no information about you or your Mac beyond what any web request carries (your IP address and the app's version). Dictation never waits on it.
Transcripts are stored locally so you can copy or re-paste a recent one. You can delete any transcript, and clear the whole history, from the app. Deleting removes it from storage.
This website
This site does not set analytics cookies, does not run a tracking pixel, and does not embed a social widget. It loads two typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com; Google receives your IP address and user agent as part of that request.
The demonstration strip on the home page uses your browser's own speech recognition, and only while you are holding the control. In most browsers that feature sends the captured audio to the browser vendor's servers for recognition. That is your browser's behavior, not the app's, and it is why the strip says so on the page. Nothing you say to that strip is sent to us, and nothing is stored.
Hosting is Netlify, which keeps standard server logs.
The early access list
If you give us an email address, we keep it to tell you when Typing Optional goes on sale and what the price is. The form is handled by Netlify Forms, so the submission passes through Netlify and is stored there.
We do not sell the list, rent it, or hand it to anyone for their own use. Every message we send from it has an unsubscribe link, and asking us to remove you by email works just as well.
Screen context
The app has an optional mode that reads unusual words off your screen so it can spell them correctly. It is disabled until you turn it on, and when you do, the app explains what it captures before it captures anything.
When it is on: captured images are held in memory, are not written to disk, and are released as soon as they have been read. A panel names each word that was learned, counts down in the open, and dismisses itself. Capture is skipped when a password manager or any app you have excluded is in front. Turning the mode off stops capture immediately and offers to delete everything learned that way.
Your choices
You can ask us what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, and ask for it to be deleted. For the early access list that is one address and one date, and deletion is immediate. Write to the address below.
The app holds nothing we can see, so there is nothing for us to return or delete: everything it stores is on your Mac, under your control, and removing the app removes it.
Contact
Typing Optional is made by High5 Labs.