Can Dicta run fully firewalled? What endpoints does it call?

Most dictation apps answer “what do I need to allow through the firewall” with a list of required endpoints, because their core function depends on the network. Dicta’s answer is different: dictation needs none of it. Recording, speech recognition, corrections and the AI rewrite all run on your Mac, so a block-all firewall or a locked-down corporate proxy blocks nothing that dictation depends on. You can verify this yourself: set the firewall to block everything and keep dictating.

The app is not silent forever, though, so here is the complete, honest list of what it does call. License activate, refresh and deactivate check a hashed license key and device id against our licensing service, hosted on Cloudflare under the getdicta.ai domain, at most weekly; the call never carries audio or text. Your license validates offline for its whole paid or trial term, so nothing has to phone home mid-term; once the term ends there is a 3-day offline grace period on a paid subscription and none on a trial. An optional config sync, planned for after launch on paid tiers, will do the same for an end-to-end encrypted blob of your settings and vocabulary, so the server only ever holds ciphertext it cannot read. The first time you need a model, the app fetches it once from the model host, Hugging Face’s CDN at huggingface.co, then caches it on disk. There is also a daily usage-statistics upload, linked to your license, from a paid, activated install only (a running trial sends none): counters only (dictations, words, audio duration, model usage, app version, platform), never content. It is on by default, toggled off in Settings > Data & Privacy immediately, retained for 13 months, and erasable on request. Once auto-update ships (Sparkle, blocked today on Apple Developer Program enrollment, tracked as issue #36), it will check a getdicta.ai-hosted update feed, again with no content. None of that is required to dictate, so a fully firewalled or air-gapped network blocks nothing dictation depends on, on every tier, Free, Pro or Team, not as a separate paid add-on. See Privacy for the full network-call inventory and Pricing for plan details.