Report a bad dictation: the one time audio leaves your Mac

Speech recognition and translation in VerbaIDE run on your Mac, and your speech never goes to us. That makes it hard for us to learn when recognition fails. So we added one exception. You can send us a single bad dictation, but only if you choose to, step by step.

What you switch on and press

First, you turn on a checkbox in the app: “Help improve speech recognition”. It sits next to the statistics consent, is separate from it, and is off by default. Sending statistics does not turn it on, and it does not send anything by itself.

Second, after that, you press Control-Option-Command-B. A window opens. You see one of your last three dictations, you can play it back, and you see its text and, for a dictation with translation, the translation. You can also write a line about what went wrong. This is optional.

Third, you press “Send”. Nothing leaves the Mac before that.

What happens before and after

Until you press Send, the audio of your last three dictations lives only in memory. It is not written to disk, and it is forgotten when you quit the app.

Without the checkbox, the menu item is hidden, the shortcut does nothing and sending is blocked. If you switch the checkbox off later, the window closes and the temporary audio is erased.

When you press Send, the app sends this: the recording of that one dictation, the recognized text, the translation if there is one, your problem description, your email if you typed one, the versions of the app and macOS, and an anonymous installation number. The number is a fingerprint of the installation key, not your account. We use it only to limit how many reports one installation can send. The report goes to api.verbaide.com. It needs no sign-in and no consent to statistics.

How long we keep it

Our privacy page says it plainly: we keep a report until we delete it by hand. There is no automatic deletion yet. If you want your report deleted sooner, write to [email protected].

Why we ask for this

When a recognizer fails, the sound is the only reliable evidence. A text description cannot say whether the word was mumbled, the microphone was quiet or the model made a mistake. With the recording we can reproduce the case, and fix it for everyone who says the same thing. It is the only place where audio leaves your Mac, and it happens only when you press the button.

The full list of network requests is on the page what leaves your Mac, and our promise on speech is on the privacy-first page.