Privacy

What leaves your Mac, and what never does.

Heliotype records and transcribes your meetings on your own Mac. This page says exactly what it captures, the one thing that ever leaves the machine — and when, and to whom — and where everything is stored. No summaries of intent: just what the software does.

The short version

  • One thing leaves your Mac, and only when you ask for a transcript: the extracted mono 16 kHz audio track of a recording you chose to transcribe. It is uploaded over HTTPS to AssemblyAI, the transcription service, using your own API key.
  • Nothing leaves during recording. The raw video is never uploaded. The screen is never captured. Your microphone is not streamed anywhere.
  • There is no Heliotype account, no sign-in, no telemetry, no analytics, and no crash reporting. Heliotype has no server of its own.
  • Everything else stays local: recordings, transcripts, your calendar lookups, your API key, and all logs live on your Mac.

What Heliotype captures

When you record a meeting (menu bar, macOS 15+), Heliotype captures two audio streams: system audio — what you hear, the remote participants — via a CoreAudio process tap, and your microphone — what you say. The tap is audio only. There is no screen recording and no purple screen-sharing indicator, because nothing on your screen is captured. The two tracks are mixed into a single .m4a recording in your folder. No bot joins your call; nothing on the meeting platform sees Heliotype.

When you transcribe something you already have (Finder right-click Transcribe with Heliotype, or the menu-bar picker), Heliotype reads only the audio or video file you selected. It does not scan or index anything else on your disk.

The one thing that leaves your Mac

Transcription runs on AssemblyAI’s cloud, so audio has to be sent there. To keep that upload minimal and honest:

  • ffmpeg first extracts a mono 16 kHz audio track. Only that extracted track is uploaded — never the original video (the picture never leaves), never the full-quality source.
  • The track goes over HTTPS to api.assemblyai.com at transcription time only — the moment you trigger a transcript, not during recording, and never in the background. That host is the only endpoint Heliotype talks to for transcription.
  • The upload authenticates with your own AssemblyAI API key. Heliotype has no key, no account, and no billing relationship of its own.

Who AssemblyAI is, and what they receive

AssemblyAI (assemblyai.com) is the third-party speech-to-text service that produces your speaker-labeled transcript. They receive the extracted audio track you chose to transcribe and return the text. Their handling of that audio is governed by their own agreement and privacy policy — see assemblyai.com/legal. Because you bring your own key, your relationship for that audio is directly with them, not brokered through us. The finished transcript is written as plain text on your Mac, next to the source, and is not sent anywhere else.

Calendar naming stays local

Recordings are auto-named PROJECT-Title-YYYYMMDD-HHMM.m4a. The title comes from the calendar event covering “now,” read locally through Apple’s EventKit. macOS asks for Calendar permission just in time — the first time a recording is named, never at launch. Nothing about your calendar is uploaded. An optional power-user path uses your own claude CLI with its Microsoft 365 connector, and only if you have already configured it. If neither is available, the name is a clean timestamp — naming never blocks a recording.

What is never collected

  • No Heliotype account, login, or profile.
  • No usage telemetry, analytics, event tracking, or crash reports.
  • No contact list, browsing history, or scanning of your disk beyond the recording or item you hand it.
  • No advertising identifiers. Heliotype has no advertising and no third-party SDKs that phone home.

Where things are stored on your Mac

  • Recordings and transcripts — your recording folder, by default ~/Movies/Heliotype (change it with Set Recording Folder…). Transcripts of right-clicked items land next to their source.
  • Your AssemblyAI API key — the macOS login Keychain (service “Heliotype”). It is never written to a config file or a log. A plaintext key from an older version is migrated into the Keychain automatically on first run and stripped from the config.
  • Settings — ~/Library/Application Support/Heliotype/config.json (recording folder, project tags — no secrets).
  • Logs and transient status — /tmp/heliotype_transcribe.log and per-job status under /tmp/heliotype_transcribe/. Local diagnostics only: names and progress, never your key. In-progress recordings buffer to a temporary folder that is deleted once the recording is saved.

Deleting everything

  1. Quit the app — menu-bar icon → Quit Heliotype.
  2. Remove the Finder Quick Action — delete ~/Library/Services/Transcribe with Heliotype.workflow.
  3. Drag Heliotype.app from Applications to the Trash.
  4. Delete your recordings and transcripts — the recording folder (default ~/Movies/Heliotype, or wherever you pointed it).
  5. Delete settings and the bundled ffmpeg — rm -rf "$HOME/Library/Application Support/Heliotype".
  6. Remove the API key from the Keychain — security delete-generic-password -s Heliotype -a assemblyai_api_key (or delete the “Heliotype” item in Keychain Access).
  7. Optionally clear logs — rm -rf /tmp/heliotype_transcribe.log /tmp/heliotype_transcribe.

After that, nothing from Heliotype remains on your Mac. Audio you previously transcribed, and any transcripts held by AssemblyAI, are governed by their policy — delete those through your AssemblyAI account.

This website

heliotype.app sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from third parties — no CDN fonts, no scripts, no trackers. The one exception happens only by your action: if you type your email into the update form and press subscribe, that address is sent to Buttondown, the newsletter service, and used for nothing else.

Questions

Questions about this statement: hello@heliotype.app.