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What leaves your Mac
Exactly which parts of Infina run on your Mac and which talk to a server.
Plenty of apps say “private” and leave it there. This page is the specific version: what runs on your Mac, what talks to a server, and how to check for yourself.
It comes down to one thing — whether you have the Infina Cloud add-on. Without it, your voice and your words stay on your Mac. That is not a setting you have to find; it is what the app does when the add-on isn't there.
Without Infina Cloud: nothing you say leaves
This covers the $99 lifetime license on its own, and the free trial. Every step runs on your Mac:
- Waiting for the trigger word. A tiny on-device listener, listening for one thing. It cannot record, store, or send audio.
- Hearing you. Your speech is transcribed on your Mac, on Apple's Neural Engine.
- Tidying the text. Punctuation and formatting are applied by rules running on your Mac.
- Voice commands. Heard on your Mac and understood on your Mac.
Your audio never leaves. Your dictated text never leaves.
Why you don't have to trust a switch for this
It is enforced twice, in two places that don't depend on each other. The app resolves every voice path to on-device whenever the add-on isn't active, ignoring whatever settings happen to be saved. And the servers independently refuse cloud work for an account that isn't entitled to it. A stale or edited setting on your Mac cannot talk them into it.
On-device is also a floor, never a ceiling. No individual setting can quietly move one part of the app back to the cloud.
With Infina Cloud: what changes
The add-on exists because polishing text well needs models bigger than a Mac can run. So with it active:
- Dictation audio goes to our servers for both push-to-talk and hands-free. That is the part you paid for. Either one can be moved back on-device on its own, in Settings → Models.
- Voice commands are still heard on your Mac. Always, subscriber or not — commands are short and latency matters more than polish. What gets sent for a subscriber is the command's text, to work out what you meant, never the audio.
One switch undoes all of it: setting Settings → Models to On-device puts every path back on your Mac, even with an active subscription.
Wi-Fi drops, dictation doesn't
If the network goes away, Infina falls back to the on-device pipeline on its own rather than failing — and switches back when the connection returns. Nothing to notice, nothing to do.
What talks to a server no matter what
Being straight about the rest, because “nothing leaves your Mac” is a claim about your dictation, not about the whole app:
- Signing in, and checking your license.
- App updates.
- Anonymous product analytics — never your dictated text.
- Anything you deliberately sync, like notes, chat, and connected integrations.
The exception worth knowing about
When a voice command runs entirely on your Mac, the command's text is sent to us to be counted.
The reason is dull: a command that never touches a server also never gets counted, and the free trial is measured in commands and words. So the text is sent, checked to see whether it counts at all (things like “send it” are free), counted, and discarded. It is never written to a database.
Dictation does not do this. When you dictate on-device, only the number of words is sent, never the words.
Checking it yourself
Don't take our word for it — turn off Wi-Fi and use it. Without the add-on, dictation and voice commands keep working exactly as before, because none of it needed a server. That is the whole claim, and it takes thirty seconds to test.