Privacy

This website sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from third party servers. The Orbly apps turn your voice into text on your own device. No account, no telemetry, no crash reporting. Nothing you dictate is uploaded anywhere.

The apps make one kind of network request: downloading the speech model once during setup, and on the Mac an update check. Both are described below.

Louis Saks
Palisadenstraße 53
10243 Berlin
Germany
Email: louissaks@gmail.com

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The recording is turned into text on the iPhone itself, by a speech model that sits in the app. Audio is held in memory while you speak and is discarded right after the text is produced. It is never uploaded and, apart from the technical exception below, never written to disk.

The exception: on some devices iOS forces the keyboard to record into a temporary file instead of memory. That file lives in the app’s private temporary folder, carries iOS file protection so it cannot be read while the device is locked, and is deleted as soon as the text has been produced. Anything left behind by a crash is cleaned up the next time you dictate.

Outside an active dictation the app keeps at most three seconds of audio in memory, so the first syllable is not cut off. That buffer is never stored and is cleared when the session ends.

iOS asks you to allow “Full Access” for the Orbly keyboard. That is a strong permission, so here is exactly what it is used for and what it is not used for.

It is needed for one reason. The speech model is a file in the shared container of the app, and without Full Access a keyboard extension cannot read that container. No Full Access means no model, and therefore no dictation.

What the keyboard does not do: it does not record, store or transmit what you type. There is no keystroke logging, no network code in the keyboard at all, and no analytics.

What it reads, and when. Before inserting a dictation, the keyboard looks at the character directly in front of the cursor, to decide whether a space is needed. While the AI bar is open, it also reads the text in front of the cursor, at most 800 characters, so it can rewrite what you have already written and replace it afterwards. That text stays in memory for as long as the bar is open, is never written to disk and never sent anywhere. In password fields the AI bar does not open at all.

A finished dictation is tied to the text field it was requested from. If you have moved on to a different field, it is not inserted. In password fields it is only ever inserted when it was requested from that exact field.

Everything below stays inside the app’s own container on your iPhone. None of it is transmitted.

Speech model. The file you download during setup. It contains no personal data. It is excluded from iCloud backups, because it can be downloaded again at any time and would otherwise take up to 574 MB of your backup.

Settings. Language, model choice, haptics, and whether history is switched on.

Statistics. Per dictation: the date, the number of words and how long you spoke. Never the dictated text itself. The app uses this for the dashboard, including the estimate of how much time you saved compared to typing. Entries older than 30 days are folded into four running totals, so old days lose their detail.

History.If left switched on, the last 50 dictations in plain text, so you can copy them again. AI results are kept there too and are labelled as such. That means a history entry can contain text you pasted from someone else’s message, because that is what a reply was written from. Anything older than 30 days is deleted automatically. The file carries iOS file protection and cannot be read while the device is locked. You can delete single entries, clear the whole history, or switch the feature off, which deletes it immediately. It is part of your iCloud backup, so a new iPhone gets it back. Apple encrypts iCloud backups.

Handover to the keyboard. When you dictate through the app, the finished text waits in the shared container until the keyboard inserts it. It is deleted the moment that happens, expires on its own if it never does, and is removed when you clear the history.

Clipboard. Quick dictation puts the text on the clipboard. Orbly marks it local only, so it is not synced to your Mac or iPad through Universal Clipboard, and sets it to expire after 30 minutes. Orbly never reads the content of your clipboard on its own. The keyboard asks iOS whether the clipboard holds any text at all, to decide what to offer you; that answer is a yes or no and never the content. The content only reaches Orbly when you tap the system paste button yourself.

Rewriting with AI.Reply, Say yes, Say no, Rewrite, Shorten, Formal, Translate and As email run on Apple’s on-device model (Apple Intelligence). The text does not leave the iPhone: there is no cloud service behind these buttons, not even Apple’s Private Cloud Compute, and no other AI provider is involved. This needs a device that supports Apple Intelligence; without it the buttons say so instead of doing nothing. The result is shown to you first and is only written into your text field when you accept it. Texts produced this way are machine generated, which is worth knowing before you send them on.

The only network request. Downloading a speech model during setup. You choose one of four (about 32, 60, 190 or 574 MB). The file comes from Hugging Face, Inc., 20 Jay Street, Suite 620, Brooklyn, NY 11201, USA. Hugging Face receives what any web server receives: your IP address and the request itself. No account, no identifier, and nothing you dictated. Because that is a transfer to the USA, it happens on your instruction under Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR, only when you start the download. Orbly pins the exact file version and verifies its SHA-256 checksum before the file is used. After that the app works fully offline.

There is no update check in the iPhone app, no crash reporter, no advertising identifier and no third party SDK.

iOS does not let a keyboard use the microphone. So when you tap the orb in the keyboard, Orbly opens the main app, records there, and hands the finished text back to the keyboard through the shared container. That detour is the reason the app appears for a moment.

To make that fast, the app can hold a dictation session open while it is in the background. During that session the microphone stays ready, and the orange dot in the status bar shows it. Nothing is recorded outside a session, the session ends itself after ten minutes without use, and you can end it in the app at any time. Audio from a running session is held in memory for at most three seconds so the first syllable is not cut off.

The widget, the Control Center button and the Shortcuts action do one thing: they leave a note in the shared container that says a dictation was requested, and they open the app. They process no text, make no network request and collect nothing.

Audio is recorded on your device, converted to text there and then discarded. Recordings are not stored and never uploaded.

The Mac app keeps two local files in your user folder: statistics (numbers only, never the dictated text) and, if you leave history switched on, the last dictations. History entries older than three days are deleted automatically, and you can clear or disable history in the settings.

Network requests the Mac app makes: the update check, and, only if you configure it yourself, a whisper server in your own network. There is no account and no telemetry.

On the iPhone: switching history off deletes it right away, and entries disappear by themselves after 30 days. You can delete single entries, clear the whole history, and remove downloaded models one by one in the settings. Deleting the app removes its whole container, including models, settings, statistics and history.

On the Mac: clear history and statistics in the app, or delete the files in your user folder.

If you write to us, we process your email address and the content of your message to answer it (Art. 6 (1) (b) and (f) GDPR). We delete the correspondence once it is no longer needed.

Orbly is not aimed at children, and it collects no data from anyone, whatever their age.

You have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection under Art. 15 to 21 GDPR, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Since we store no personal data beyond the server logs described above, there is usually nothing for us to hand over or delete. Everything the apps store stays on your own device and is under your control.