Skip to main content

​
The guarantee

Audio never leaves your machine. There is no server component, no account, and no analytics. The only network request Sotto ever makes is downloading a speech model, from the official whisper.cpp model repository, at the moment you ask for one. After that it never contacts anything again — including for updates, which is why there is no update check. The LOCAL badge on the dictation pill is there as a constant reminder of that promise.

​
What this means in practice

  • You can dictate confidential material without it being processed by a third party.
  • You can work with no network connection at all.
  • There is no account, so there is no account data.
  • There is no usage data, because nothing is collected and nothing is sent.
  • Nobody can be compelled to hand over your transcripts, because nobody else has them.

​
What Sotto stores on your machine

Transcripts are not stored. Text goes to the focused application, the clipboard, or the notepad window, and Sotto does not keep a history of it. Audio is held in memory only for as long as it takes to transcribe. Nothing is written to disk.
The clipboard is a shared resource on your desktop. If you use a clipboard manager with history, dictated text may end up in its history — which is your clipboard manager’s behaviour, not Sotto’s. Choose Type it as the output mode if that matters.

​
What Sotto cannot promise

  • It does not encrypt your disk. Settings and models sit in plain files, like everything else in your home directory.
  • It cannot protect you from your own system. Anything running as you can see your clipboard and read your configuration.
  • The paste path uses your clipboard, as above.

​
Licence

Sotto is being released as open source under the Apache License 2.0. Apache-2.0 rather than MIT for two reasons that matter for a company-owned project:
  • An explicit patent grant. Contributors and Mauvely grant patent rights along with copyright ones, which removes an ambiguity MIT leaves open.
  • Trademark clarity. The licence covers the code without granting rights to the Mauvely and Sotto names, so you can fork the code freely without the fork looking like an official release.
It remains a permissive licence: you can use, modify, redistribute and build commercial products on Sotto, including in closed-source software, with attribution and notice of changes.

​
Third-party components

The licence is being finalised as part of a public release. Until the LICENSE file lands in the repository, treat this page as a statement of intent rather than the operative grant.