Gabble privacy policy

Last updated 8 October 2026.

Gabble is built so that there is very little to say here.

What Gabble collects

Nothing. Gabble has no account system, no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising. I (Gjorge Karakabakov, the developer) receive no data from the app.

Your audio

Audio from your microphone is captured into memory only while you hold the dictation key (or while hands-free mode is on). It is transcribed on your Mac by the speech model you chose and then discarded. It is never written to disk and never sent over the network.

Your text

Transcripts, your dictionary, snippets, modes and app rules are stored as JSON files in ~/Library/Application Support/Gabble on your Mac. You can open, back up or delete them at any time, and you can set history to keep forever, 30 days, 7 days or not at all.

Network requests the app makes

  • Model downloads. When you download a speech model, Gabble fetches it from Hugging Face (huggingface.co). Hugging Face sees your IP address, like any download server.

  • AI cleanup, only if you turn it on. It is off by default. If you choose Ollama, transcript text is sent to the Ollama server on your own Mac. If you enter an Anthropic or OpenAI-compatible API key, transcript text (and your dictionary terms, so names are spelled correctly) is sent to that provider under your account and their terms. Audio is never sent. Your API key is stored in the macOS Keychain.

  • Update checks. Once a day Gabble fetches a small file from this site (gabble.karakabakov.com/appcast.xml) to see whether a newer version exists, and downloads the update from here when there is one. The request carries no identifier and no usage data; the server sees your IP address and the app version in the request header, like any web request. You can turn automatic installs off in Settings → Updates.

That is the complete list.

Permissions

  • Microphone: to hear you while you dictate.
  • Accessibility: to notice the dictation key while another app is in front, and to paste text into that app.

This website

This site is static and hosted on Netlify, which keeps standard server logs.

The site (not the app) uses Google Analytics to count visits, see which pages are read and how many people download Gabble. Google Analytics sets cookies in your browser (_ga and _ga_FCQQG3Y3M3, kept for up to two years) and receives your IP address, browser and device details, the pages you view and the site you came from. Google processes this under its own privacy policy. I see aggregated reports only, and nothing in them is linked to the app or to anything you dictate.

To opt out, block cookies for this site, use a content blocker, or install Google's opt-out add-on.

Contact

Questions go to the developer via karakabakov.com.