Phantom Voice
Local push-to-talk dictation for Mac
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Do you actually care that your data is being sent to the cloud from your apps?

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Are you totally against sharing your personal data to companies? or are you neutral and think your info doesn't matter that much? Not just words from dictation apps, but other personal details like schedules from a productivity app, or computer details from coding agents. Asking this cause I personally don't mind my app data being sent to companies, as long as they're not passwords, or important personal info. But this brings us to another question, where is the line?

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I personally don't mind sending data to the cloud if it's clear what is collected and why.

 That’s fair, but transparency on paper doesn't guarantee compliance in practice. Even if a policy says 'X is collected,' there's zero technical barrier stopping them from harvesting Y behind the scenes.

I don't mind sharing some data if I clearly understand what's being collected and why. The lack of transparency is usually what makes me uncomfortable. Have you found that most users care more about privacy itself or just having the option to choose?

 I don't have enough users to form a definite answer, but just by reading this forum, I think people are fine with data sent to the cloud(with or without consent), as long as they are reminded in advance. Which got me thinking, most apps or websites have privacy terms available somewhere, even if it's not necessary, if they showed their privacy terms up front, before people even start using the app, would the user feel more secure and trust the app more?

The real line for me isn't what a privacy policy promises, it's whether the thing could technically run without a network call at all. A policy is a promise. Local-only is an architecture, and you can't quietly break an architecture the way you can quietly break a promise.

 True, that's why more and more people are choosing local alternatives

I'd separate what people say from what they do, because the gap is enormous and it's the interesting part.

I've shipped a Chrome extension, which means I've watched people accept a permission dialog that literally says "read and change all your data on all websites." Almost nobody reads it. The same people will tell you in a survey that privacy matters a great deal to them, and they're not lying — the concern is real, it just doesn't survive contact with a thing they want to use right now.

What actually seems to move people isn't the sending, it's whether the sending is obviously necessary for the feature. Dictation audio going to a server is annoying but legible: of course it has to go somewhere to be transcribed. A productivity app uploading my schedule isn't legible in the same way, because I can't construct the reason on my own. That's where the unease comes from — not the transfer, the unexplained transfer.

So the version of the question I'd ask users is narrower: can you tell me why this left my machine? If they can't answer it, they get uncomfortable regardless of what the policy says. If they can, most people stop caring almost immediately.

  True, the user usually doesn't really know what they want or what they should be concerned about, at least not until something unfortunate has happened to them or other people.

 That's the uncomfortable version and I think it's right. Concern is retrospective for most people — it arrives attached to a specific incident, not to a policy they read.

Which puts builders in an awkward spot, because the people who'd benefit most from local-first aren't asking for it yet, and the ones who are asking have usually already been burned. You end up building for the second group and hoping the first group arrives before something bad happens to them.

Good thread — this one clarified something I'd been circling for a while.

i think in these days no data is safe.

 True, and because comparisons matter, although local alternatives might still collect your data when connected to wifi, the risk and the data stolen is way smaller compared to cloud apps.

I care deeply about this, especially when it comes to AI tools.

The line for me is transparency versus necessity. If an app needs a backend database to function (like a multiplayer game or a collaborative workspace), I expect data to go to the cloud.

But what drives me crazy are the thousands of "AI Prompt Generators" or "Text Analyzers" that force you to create an account and log your inputs on their servers, when the entire application could just run locally in the browser.

That frustration is exactly why I built my own AI prompt engineering wizard to run 100% locally using localStorage. If an app can be built local-first without sacrificing features, it absolutely should be. Users shouldn't have to guess what is happening to their proprietary code snippets or private thoughts just to format an AI prompt.

 Nah facts, local is the hero we need.

100%! Phantom Voice looks super clean by the way, tackling local dictation is a huge win for privacy. Dropped an upvote for the launch today, congrats!

 Thanks man that means a lot, really encourage you to go try it out on the site. It has 14 days of free trial, no card needed. already 3 updates have been deployed since launch, I care deeply about yall's user experience.

The line for me is not about how sensitive the data is. It is about whose it is.

For my own stuff I am roughly where you are. Schedules, machine specs, whatever I typed into a coding agent, take it. I am not doing anything interesting enough for it to matter.

But a lot of what moves through my tools is not mine. Call recordings have a customer in them. Outreach drafts have a prospect who never agreed to anything. CRM notes are somebody else's business, written down by me. The moment a tool touches that, my personal tolerance stops being the relevant input, because I am consenting on behalf of people who were never asked.

That turns out to be a much easier line to hold than a sliding scale of sensitivity. Mine, do what you like. Not mine, it does not leave the machine.

Arash named the mechanism that makes it enforceable. A policy is a promise you cannot verify. Local-only is a property you can. For the second category I want the property, not the promise, and that is the entire reason a tool like this one gets installed.

 Well said

 Thanks Willis. And worth saying plainly, since you are the one building it: that distinction is a feature you can sell, not just a principle.

Most privacy messaging is aimed at the buyer's own paranoia, which is a weak motivator because most people correctly judge their own data to be boring. The stronger pitch is the one where the buyer is holding someone else's material and does not want to be the person who consented on their behalf.

That is a much less crowded thing to say, and it is the version a company can take to their own legal team without a fight.

 Yeah no wonder most developers & vibe coders prefer local dictation over cloud dictation, cause they usually have multiple projects and provide services to multiple clients, and while talking to AI, client information will more often than not be mentioned, that is where local dictation is a must, if you care about your client's info. To be honest this is my first product, and I just created this forum to spark up some views, but I actually learned a lot from these forums and my main launch forums, and have already deployed some updates to my app phantom voice. I'm very grateful for you guys giving valuable advice and insights.

 That extension is better than my version because it is concrete. "Client information gets mentioned while talking to an AI" is the exact moment the abstraction becomes real, and it is a sentence a buyer recognises about themselves immediately. I would put that on the site.

On it being your first product. What you just did, posting a question instead of a pitch and then actually reading the answers, is the part most first launches skip entirely. The common version is showing up on launch day, asking for upvotes, and disappearing. Starting a conversation and learning from it is slower and works considerably better.

Keep this thread. In a month it will be worth more to you than the launch day numbers, because you will still be able to point at it when somebody asks why local only matters.

 You a G

Rabnoor's distinction is the right one. I'd add the mechanism that makes it decisive inside a company, rather than just principled.

If you're the person who signs a tool off, cloud versus local isn't a risk judgement. It's a workstream. A cloud tool means adding a sub-processor to the register, updating the privacy notice, getting a DPA in place, assessing the transfer if they sit outside the UK or EU, and then reviewing all of that again every year, forever. Local-only means none of it exists, because there is no processor to name. Nobody had to be persuaded about risk. The paperwork simply never comes into being.

That's why cheap cloud tools get blocked in organisations while far more expensive ones sail through. It's rarely the money. It's that someone has to own the annual review, and nobody wants to own it for a ten dollar utility.

Willis, on your question about showing terms up front: for individuals I doubt it moves the needle much, for the reasons Yuki gives. But "runs locally, nothing leaves the device, no sub-processor" is a sentence that saves a specific person a specific afternoon. That's the audience where privacy copy actually converts, because it's the only one where privacy has a line item attached to it.

 Yeah, time to change the body text of my website

  Fastest feedback loop I've seen all day.

One thought on where it goes, because it's the same problem as a label needing to survive into the notification. The person that sentence is written for usually isn't the one on your site. It's whoever they forward it to. So it wants a stable URL it can be pasted from, rather than a line in the hero that someone has to screenshot.

And keep the two claims separate, because they do different jobs. Audio never leaves your Mac is a claim about behaviour. Nothing to add to your sub-processor register is a claim about paperwork. The second is the one that saves somebody an afternoon, and almost no tool in your category can say it truthfully, which is exactly why it's worth saying plainly rather than leaving people to infer it.

 noted, and changed on my site, I'm working on adding a app reviews section on it and will soon deploy the new site, thanks for the suggestions

 Good, glad it was useful.

One thing I would put next to the reviews section, because it is the harder half. A reviews section is a claim about other apps. The trust question is about yours, and the strongest version of nothing leaves your machine is naming the exceptions out loud. Update checks, crash reporting, licence validation, and whatever a dependency phones home about all count, and they are exactly what turns an honest claim into a technically false one when somebody runs a packet capture.

Saying "here are the four connections this app makes and here is what each one contains" is far more convincing than a stronger sounding absolute, because the person who cares enough to read it is the person who was going to check anyway.