In memory
Audio is captured while the hotkey is active, transcribed locally, then discarded.
Privacy
Privacy model
Parakey is local-first in the strict sense: no analytics SDK, no accounts, no crash reporter, no transcript sync, and no cloud transcription endpoint.
What happens to the audio
Transcript handling
Clipboard paste
The finished text is copied to the general pasteboard and pasted into the focused app with ⌘ V.
No transcript logs
Logs include timing and length metadata only. Transcript content is not written to disk.
Three calls, fully listed
Network calls
This is the complete network surface of Parakey itself and its install/update path.
| When | Destination | Purpose | User control |
|---|---|---|---|
| First launch | huggingface.co |
FluidAudio downloads the Parakeet TDT v3 CoreML model weights, about 600 MB, into the local support cache. | Required once for local transcription. |
| Periodic update check | api.github.com/repos/rcourtman/parakey/releases/latest |
Anonymous release lookup every six hours, plus one check shortly after launch. | Disable from Settings. |
| User-triggered update | github.com/rcourtman/parakey/releases/download/... |
Homebrew downloads the signed release archive when the user chooses to update. | Only runs when the user updates. |
Machine-readable version: privacy/network-calls.json.
Sandbox surface
Permissions and entitlements
The notarised app uses two hardened-runtime entitlements: audio input and microphone. macOS also requires user-granted Accessibility and Input Monitoring permissions for the hotkey and paste workflow.
Parakey does not add JIT, unsigned executable memory, library-validation, network-client, contacts, calendar, location, camera, or file-provider entitlements.