Blog
Notes from building Bellow
How the app works, what we got wrong, and how to verify the privacy claims yourself instead of taking our word for it.
Bellow has no updater and no telemetry. Here's the cost of that.
An app that never contacts a server cannot check for updates or measure its own usage. Both are real losses. Why we took them, and what we do instead.
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Dictating code and technical terms: what works, what doesn't
Speech models are trained on speech, not source code. What that means in practice for developers, where dictation genuinely helps, and where it wastes your time.
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Choosing a push-to-talk key on macOS, and why it's harder than it looks
Fn, Command, Option: each has a different failure mode as a hold-to-talk trigger. What goes wrong with each, and how to pick one that works on your keyboard.
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Encrypting transcript history: what it protects, and what it doesn't
Bellow encrypts your dictation history with AES-GCM and a device-only Keychain key. Here is the threat model that justifies, and the ones it does not.
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How to dictate on a Mac without sending your voice anywhere
A practical guide to fully local dictation on macOS: what the built-in option does, what the trade-offs are, and how to confirm nothing is being transmitted.
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Mac dictation not working? Work through this checklist
Dictation silently doing nothing on macOS is almost always one of six things. A checklist in the order that finds the cause fastest, with the exact commands to check each one.
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Why the first launch is slow, and what the Neural Engine is doing
A one-minute wait on first run, then near-instant forever. What Apple's Neural Engine is compiling during that pause, and why we now show it happening.
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What “on-device” actually means, and how to check
Plenty of apps say on-device. Some mean it. Here are four ways to verify the claim yourself on macOS, in order of how hard they are to fake.
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Why Bellow isn't on the Mac App Store
Push-to-talk dictation needs a global hotkey, and a global hotkey needs an API the App Store sandbox forbids. The honest explanation, and what we do instead.
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We shipped a feature that destroyed our own transcripts
Bellow's dictionary feature made transcription worse, not better. Here is how we measured it, why the guard we reasoned about was worthless, and what we do differently now.
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Bellow is free during early access. Install it before 1.0 and the $49 lifetime license is yours at no charge.
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