How Heron handles your data
Speech recognition, meeting notes and cleanup all run on your Mac. This page says exactly what uses the internet, when, and why. The full privacy policy is linked at the end.
Heard and recognised on your Mac. It is not uploaded. Heron deletes each recording once the text is ready. If recognition fails, it keeps that recording on your Mac so you can retry.
Transcripts, cleanup, titles and tags are produced on your Mac. Nothing is sent to a server to be processed.
Plain Markdown files in a folder you choose, ~/Notes by default. They are yours, and they outlast Heron.
| Moment | What happens | How often |
|---|---|---|
| First run | Downloads the speech model, about 600 MB, from Hugging Face. | Once |
| First run | macOS downloads Apple’s English speech files, if your Mac doesn’t have them yet. Heron uses them for the live words. | Once |
| Activating a licence | Contacts the licence server to check your key. It sends the key and a hashed identifier for your Mac, and nothing else. | Once per Mac |
| Updates | [NEED: update mechanism and what the check sends] | [NEED: frequency] |
| Dictating, meetings and writing notes | Nothing. Works with Wi-Fi off, on a plane, or with a confidential document open. | Never |
So Heron can hear you while you hold Fn or record a voice note. The mic is open only while you dictate, and macOS shows its own indicator whenever it is.
To notice your shortcut in any app and type where your cursor is. [NEED: confirm the exact Accessibility use, and whether it is true to say Heron does not read the screen]
So Heron can hear the other people on a call. It records only after you click to start, and never joins as a bot.
Cleanup, titles and tags use Apple Intelligence, which runs on your Mac. Without it, dictation and notes still work, with simpler cleanup and no AI titles or tags.
Every sentence in a cleaned-up note comes from what you said. Heron arranges your words and leaves the thinking to you.
[NEED: analytics approach for the site that fits the promise above, and which provider if any]
Payment is handled by Dodo Payments. Heron does not see your card details.
The legal version, with the same promises, is at /legal/privacy. Last reviewed [NEED: date].