Privacy
Herga is built so that your voice and your words stay on your Mac.
What stays on your Mac
Section titled “What stays on your Mac”All of it:
- Audio. Your microphone is recorded by Herga’s own native code and sent only to the local server on your Mac.
- Transcription and cleanup. Whisper and Qwen3 run on your Mac’s GPU.
- Your data. Captures, corrections, your dictionary, writing styles, learned rules and stats live in a local SQLite database and folder. Open it from Settings › General › Captures folder.
- Learning. Correction rules and personal model training run locally. Training runs with Hugging Face access switched off.
The local server listens only on 127.0.0.1, so other devices on your network can’t reach it.
When Herga uses the internet
Section titled “When Herga uses the internet”- Downloading models from Hugging Face during setup, or when you pick a different model.
- Model details. The details pane in the Models tab loads a model’s download count, likes and license from Hugging Face.
- Update check. At launch and every six hours, Herga asks GitHub for the version number of the latest release so it can tell you when an update is out. Nothing about you or your dictations is sent.
That’s it. There’s no account, no analytics, no telemetry and no crash reporting. Once your models are downloaded, you can dictate with Wi-Fi off.
Deleting your data
Section titled “Deleting your data”- Delete individual captures from the Captures tab.
- Set Keep history to delete old captures automatically. See Captures.
- To remove everything, quit Herga and delete its data folder, then delete your models from the Models tab or from the Hugging Face cache.
Check for yourself
Section titled “Check for yourself”Herga is open source. Everything above can be checked in the source code.