Security | Oravo

What runs on your Mac

Speech recognition runs on your Mac. Oravo bundles a local speech model and transcribes through it, so dictation works with no internet connection once the model has been downloaded.

Your captured audio is held in memory for the length of a dictation and is not written to disk by Oravo.

Your dictation history, learned vocabulary, and connection log are stored in files on your Mac under your user account. Oravo writes them with owner-only file permissions and tightens the permissions on existing files when it loads them.

When information leaves your Mac

Oravo makes outbound network requests in a small, fixed set of cases. There are no others.

An AI feature you invoke. Cleanup and restyle, Ask AI, and translation send the text involved — and, if you enable it in Settings, the frontmost application's name — to the AI provider you configured, using your own API key.
Downloading the speech model. The model is fetched from Hugging Face the first time it's needed, or when you pick a different model.
Licence checks. Activating or validating a Pro or Lifetime licence contacts Lemon Squeezy.
Update checks. Oravo checks oravo.app for a new version.

Every request Oravo makes on your behalf to an AI provider is recorded in the app's Privacy log, under Privacy in the menu bar panel — provider, model, mode, word count, and time. You can read it and clear it.

The AI providers Oravo can be configured to use are Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI (Grok), and Perplexity. Oravo can also be pointed at a local Ollama installation, which keeps the request on your machine.

What the website collects

To download the free app you give an email address, which our host (Netlify) records so we can send you the download link and release notes. If you buy Pro or Lifetime, Lemon Squeezy — our payment processor and merchant of record — holds your name, email, plan, and payment details. Oosan Studios never sees or stores your card number.

The website sets no advertising or tracking cookies and runs no analytics.

API keys and the macOS Keychain

API keys you add are stored in the macOS Keychain, not in a preferences file or a plain text file in the app's folder.

Keys are sent only to the provider they belong to, in a request header. They are not placed in URLs, and they are not written to Oravo's logs.

No API keys, licence keys, or other secrets are stored in Oravo's source repository.

Local-Only mode

Local-Only mode is a switch in the app's Privacy window. When it is on, Oravo will not send your transcripts anywhere: the AI features are refused rather than performed, and licence revalidation is skipped so your entitlement never expires as a result of being offline.

Local-Only is scoped to your content, not to every byte of network traffic. With it enabled, Oravo can still check oravo.app for a software update, and can still download a speech model if you ask for one. Those requests carry no dictation, no transcript, and no personal content. We describe the mode this way deliberately rather than claiming it disables all networking, because that is what the implementation actually does.

macOS permissions

Oravo asks for two permissions, and nothing else:

Microphone — to hear you while you hold the dictation hotkey. Oravo captures audio only for the duration of a dictation.
Accessibility — to insert the finished text into whichever application you're typing in. This is the macOS mechanism for placing text in another app's field.

Oravo does not request Screen Recording, Contacts, Calendar, Photos, Full Disk Access, or Automation permissions.

The application runs with the macOS hardened runtime enabled, and its only entitlement is audio input.

Signing, notarization, and updates

Every release is code-signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, then stapled, so macOS Gatekeeper can verify it before it runs.

Updates are delivered through Sparkle. Each update is cryptographically signed with a key held by Oosan Studios, and Oravo verifies that signature against a public key built into the application before installing anything. An update that does not verify is rejected.

Reporting a security issue

Found a potential security issue with Oravo?

Please report security vulnerabilities privately to hello@snaptree.app. This inbox is monitored by Oosan Studios for security reports across its products.

Please do not publicly disclose a suspected vulnerability until Oosan Studios has had a reasonable opportunity to investigate and address it.

We'll acknowledge your report, keep you updated while we look into it, and credit you if you'd like us to.