About - Pilcrow

Pilcrow is built by The Alpha Circuit, a small independent studio. It is free, it runs entirely on your Mac, and there is no company behind it that needs your data to be worth something.

Why it runs on-device

Most dictation tools stream your audio to a server, because until recently that was the only way to get good transcription. macOS 26 shipped speech models that run locally and are good enough, so the server stopped being necessary — and an audio pipeline that never leaves your Mac cannot be breached, subpoenaed, or quietly repurposed for training.

That is the whole product thesis. Everything else — the single trigger key, the panel that never takes focus, the transcript that stays on your clipboard in case the paste missed — is detail work in service of it.

How a free app stays free

It costs us almost nothing to run. There are no servers to pay for because there is no server, no transcription bill because Apple’s models are doing the work on your machine, and no support burden from accounts because there are no accounts.

So there is no business model that needs to appear later. If Pilcrow ever gains a paid tier it will be for new work, and the terms commit us to leaving existing installs working.

What you are trusting us with

Accessibility access is a strong permission, and you should be wary of apps that ask for it. Three things that are checkable rather than promised:

The app makes one network request, and only one: asking this site whether a newer version exists. Not for transcription, not for analytics, not for a licence check. Turn update checks off in Settings and there is none at all — block it with Little Snitch, or pull the cable, and dictation behaves identically either way.
Nothing it produces is written to disk. Transcripts live in memory and are gone when it quits.
Every release is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the binary you run is the one we built and has been scanned by Apple for malware. Gatekeeper checks that for you before it opens.

The privacy policy states all of this in the form that binds us.

If we stop

Small apps get abandoned; pretending otherwise is not honest. Pilcrow has no server and no licence check, so an abandoned copy keeps working for as long as macOS keeps running it. Nothing switches off because we stopped paying a bill.

What it is built on

Pilcrow uses Apple’s on-device speech recognition, which is why the transcription works with the network off and why it needs macOS 26. The one other piece of code we did not write is Sparkle, which handles updates — it is what makes the update check in Privacy the only request the app ever sends.

Getting in touch

support@thealphacircuit.com reaches a person. Bug reports, feature requests, and “this is broken on my Mac” are all welcome — the help page is the fastest route for the common ones.

If Pilcrow has become part of how you work, we would like to hear that too — tell us how you use it. We may want to quote you on this site one day, and if so we will ask first, by name, before anything is published. Nothing on this site is a quote we made up.