Support and contact — DictateLocal

Contact us

By email at [email protected]. To speed things up, include your macOS version, your Mac model, the DictateLocal version (Settings, About) and, if the app showed a message, its exact text. Never send audio recordings containing personal information: a description of the problem is enough.

For billing questions (invoice, VAT, refund, cancelling a subscription), write to the same address and mention the email used at purchase. Lemon Squeezy, our merchant of record, also sent you a receipt with a link to your order: that is where you cancel a subscription, in a few clicks.

Activate or deactivate a license

Click the DictateLocal icon in the menu bar, then Settings….
Open the About page. The License card shows the current state (trial, days left, lifetime license active or subscription active).
Paste your key into the License key field and click Activate. The Buy a license… button opens the pricing page if you do not have a key yet; a subscription key is activated in exactly the same way.
To free an activation, click Deactivate on this Mac. A key, lifetime or subscription, activates on up to three Macs.

The key is checked online every two weeks; without a network, the app keeps working for thirty days. If you no longer have access to an activated Mac, email us and we will free the seat.

macOS permissions

DictateLocal only asks for the permissions needed by the feature you use. All of them are managed in System Settings, Privacy & Security.

Permission	Why	When
Microphone	Capture your voice. Audio is processed in memory, on the Mac.	Required for dictation.
Accessibility	Insert the dictated text into the active application (paste or simulated typing). Without it, the text is copied to the clipboard.	Recommended.
Input Monitoring	Detect a single key (right ⌘, right ⌥, right ⌃ or fn) used as “hold to talk”.	Only if you enable that option.
Screen & System Audio Recording	Capture the sound played by the Mac for live captions and meeting mode. No screen image is used; this is the permission macOS requires for system audio.	Only for those two features.

After granting Accessibility or Input Monitoring, macOS may ask you to relaunch the app. If you reinstalled the app, you may need to remove it from the list and add it again.

Quick troubleshooting

Text is not inserted

Check the Accessibility permission. In some applications (browsers, terminals, editors that intercept paste), change the insertion method in that app’s profile (Settings, Applications). As a last resort, the text is always on the clipboard.

“Optimising for this Mac…” stays on for a long time

This is normal the first time a model loads on a given macOS version: Core ML compiles the model for your chip. It can take over a minute and does not happen again.

No speech detected

Check the selected microphone and its level in Settings, Microphone and sounds. Constant noise without a voice deliberately does not trigger transcription.

A model download fails

Check your connection and free disk space (models range from a few hundred MB to a few GB). The download resumes from Settings, Models and language.

Diagnostics

Settings, About offers a self-test and the network log. You can send us the self-test output: it contains no audio and no dictated text.

Uninstall DictateLocal

Quit the app from the menu bar icon.
Drag DictateLocal.app from the Applications folder to the Trash.
To remove everything, delete ~/Library/Application Support/DictateLocal (models, encrypted history, license settings) and ~/Library/Preferences/com.dictatelocal.app.plist.
If you plan to reinstall on another Mac, click Deactivate on this Mac in Settings, About first.

Uninstalling removes nothing online: there is no account to close. Granted permissions can be revoked in System Settings, Privacy & Security.