Most dictation tools are thin clients. You hold a key, your microphone audio goes to somebody's server, text comes back. That design is fine for most people and genuinely impossible for some — and if you're reading this, you're probably in the second group, holding a policy document that says recorded voice cannot leave managed hardware.
Vokk transcribes on the Mac's own GPU, using whisper.cpp through Metal, in well under a second. In local mode — the default — there is no server to stream to. No account, no sign-up, no telemetry. The audit is one step: turn Wi-Fi off, hold the key, watch it type anyway.
| vokk, local mode | cloud dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| where audio is processed | on your Mac's GPU | vendor server |
| works with network off | yes | no |
| account required | none | yes |
| telemetry | none | varies |
| text you get | what you said | often LLM-rewritten |
On-device engine. whisper.cpp on Metal. The model file lives on the machine after first run; nothing about your speech is sent anywhere for it to work.
No rewriting. Vokk types what you said. No language model paraphrases your sentence before it lands, which matters when the sentence contains a patient identifier, a hostname, or a legal term of art.
Types locally into whatever window has focus. Vokk is a keyboard-level citizen: it inserts text into the frontmost app. That includes any terminal window, regardless of what that terminal happens to be connected to.
A small native app, signed and notarized. One Apple-notarized DMG, Developer ID signed, Apple Silicon, macOS 13+. No helper daemon phoning a control plane, no browser runtime bundled inside.
Cloud transcription (Groq) exists as an option behind a license, for people who want it. It is off unless you turn it on, and a fleet can be deployed with it never turned on.
Honest disclosure: Vokk is one developer. We are not SOC 2 audited. We're something simpler — software that never phones home, which you can verify yourself in about thirty seconds with the airplane test and, if your security team prefers, with a packet capture.
Because we're small, we can work with you directly rather than through a portal. Available on request:
Email [email protected] with the subject line "restricted environments" and you'll get a reply the same day.