Privacy Policy
Anelo is a voice-input tool that lives in your menu bar or system tray. You hold a key, speak, and it types the result into whatever text field you were already using. This policy describes what happens to your voice, your text and your settings.
Anelo is free. There is no account, no sign-in, and no server that belongs to us holding your data.
Summary
- By default, speech recognition and cleanup both run on your own computer. Your audio and the resulting text are not sent anywhere.
- Cloud processing is available but off unless you turn it on and supply your own API key. Anelo will not silently fall back to the cloud when local processing is unavailable — it tells you instead.
- Anelo does make a small number of network requests unrelated to transcription. They are listed in full below.
- We do not sell data, show ads, or build a profile of you.
Your voice and the text it becomes
While you hold the trigger key, Anelo records audio to a temporary file on your computer. That file is deleted once processing finishes. In the default local configuration, the audio is passed to a speech model (Whisper) and the transcript to a cleanup model (Qwen2.5, via Ollama), both running as local processes on your machine. Neither the audio nor the text leaves the computer.
If Anelo hears no speech, the recording is discarded rather than transcribed.
The clipboard, and why it is an exception
Anelo types into other applications by writing the text to your system clipboard, synthesising a paste keystroke, and then restoring whatever was in your clipboard before. This is the only technique that works across arbitrary applications.
The consequence is worth stating plainly: your transcribed text sits in the system clipboard for roughly 400 milliseconds. Clipboard manager utilities — Raycast, Maccy, Paste and similar — watch the clipboard and may record it in their own history. Anelo restores your previous clipboard contents, but it cannot prevent those tools from having already captured the text. If this matters to you, disable clipboard history in that tool or add an exclusion for Anelo.
When Anelo uses the network
This is the complete list.
- Update check — Anelo fetches
anelo.web.app/version.jsonand compares it with the version you are running. The request carries no user data. It is controlled by the "check for updates on launch" setting. - Anonymous launch signal (macOS only) — on launch, the macOS version sends one request to a GoatCounter analytics endpoint recording that an install of a given version started. It contains no identifier, no account, and no content — only the app version. Its purpose is to estimate how many installs are in use. It is controlled by the same setting as the update check: turning off "check for updates on launch" turns off this ping too. Like any HTTP request, it necessarily reveals your IP address and the request's user-agent string to the receiving service. The Windows version does not send this ping.
- Model downloads — when you choose to install local models, Anelo downloads them from public repositories (Hugging Face, and on Windows the whisper.cpp GitHub releases). These are ordinary file downloads; no content of yours is included.
- Cloud speech or cleanup, if you enable it — if you configure a cloud provider, the audio or text for that step is sent to the provider you selected, authenticated with the API key you supplied. Anelo has no server in the middle: the request goes from your computer to that provider under your own account. The supported providers are Groq, OpenAI and Google Gemini, each governed by their own terms and privacy policy. What they retain is between you and them.
- Phone remote, if you enable it — the optional remote control feature communicates directly between your phone and your computer over your own local network. It does not pass through any server of ours. It is off by default.
Your API keys
If you supply cloud API keys, they are stored using the operating system's own credential store — the Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows. They are sent only to the provider they belong to. Keys from older versions that were kept in a plain configuration file are migrated into the system store and removed from that file.
History on your computer
Anelo keeps a local history for diagnostics. By default this records metrics only — such as how long a transcription took and whether it ran locally or in the cloud — and not the text you dictated. This file stays on your computer; it is not uploaded. You can delete existing history at any time from Settings.
Permissions Anelo asks for
- Accessibility / input monitoring — to detect the trigger key anywhere in the system and to synthesise the paste keystroke. This is what makes a global hold-to-talk key possible.
- Microphone — to record while you hold the key.
- Local network — only for the optional phone remote.
- Notifications — to show status while Anelo is working.
We should note what this combination looks like from the outside: an application that installs a global keyboard hook and synthesises input into other applications is, structurally, indistinguishable from a keylogger to an antivirus scanner. Some will flag it. The difference is what the software does with what it captures, which is described above.
Children
Anelo is a developer tool and is not directed to children under 13.
Changes to this policy
If Anelo's behaviour changes, this page changes with it, and the "Last updated" date above is revised.
Contact
Questions about any of the above go to the person who wrote the app: anelo.support@gmail.com