Privacy

Last updated 28 July 2026

The short version. Your voice is transcribed entirely on your own Mac and is never uploaded. Cue has no server that sees your dictation. The only things that leave your machine are the text you explicitly choose to send to an AI provider using your own API key, a license check when you activate or renew, and an anonymous counter that tells us how many trials become purchases.

Your voice

Dictation uses Apple's on-device SpeechAnalyzer. Audio is captured, transcribed, and discarded locally. It is never written to disk by Cue, never sent to us, and never sent to any third party. This is true whether or not you have a license.

Your text

Nothing happens to your transcribed text until you press the format shortcut (⇧⌘G by default). When you do, Cue sends that text directly to whichever AI provider you configured — Anthropic or OpenAI — using your own API key.

That request goes from your Mac to the provider. Cue operates no proxy or middleman server, so we never see the text, and we never see your API key. Your key is stored in your macOS Keychain. What the provider does with the request is governed by their policy, not ours.

Licensing

When you enter a license key, Cue sends the key plus a one-way hash of your Mac's hardware identifier to our licensing server so it can bind the license to your machine and enforce the three-Mac limit. Roughly once a month it re-checks that the license is still valid.

We store your email address (supplied by Stripe at purchase, used to send you the key and to help you recover it), the license key, and the hashed machine identifiers on that license. We do not store your name, address, or payment details — those stay with Stripe, who processes the payment.

Anonymous usage counter

While Cue is running unlicensed — during the trial, or after it expires — it contacts our server at most once a day and sends three things:

A one-way hash of your Mac's hardware identifier (the same salted SHA-256 used for licensing; the underlying identifier is never transmitted and the hash cannot be reversed)
The version of Cue you're running
Your macOS version

That's the entire payload. No voice, no text, no email, no name, no IP address retained. Its only purpose is to answer one question we otherwise can't: how many people who try Cue go on to buy it. Cue is a one-person product, and that number decides what gets built next.

This never happens once you're licensed. It also can't affect your trial — the trial clock lives entirely on your Mac, so Cue keeps working normally offline and this request can never shorten, extend, or block anything.

To switch it off on a given Mac, run this in Terminal and restart Cue:

defaults write com.bbj.cue cue.analytics.optOut -bool true

Updates

Cue checks cuespeech.com/appcast.xml for new versions, roughly once a day, using the Sparkle framework. That request identifies no one — it's a plain fetch of a static file, the same one every copy of Cue requests.

The website

cuespeech.com is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server logs including IP addresses for a limited period as part of operating the service. If you send us a message through the contact form, it is delivered by EmailJS and we receive the name, email address, and message you typed.

Your rights

If you're in the EU, UK, or another jurisdiction with data-protection rights, you can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. In practice that's your email address and license record. Write to hello@cuespeech.com and we'll handle it.

The anonymous usage counter holds nothing we can trace back to a person, so there is nothing there to look up or delete — but you can stop it with the Terminal command above.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we'll update the date at the top and note it in the release notes for the version that changes it.

Contact

Cue is made by Fullspec Studio LLC, a Utah limited liability company. Questions about any of this: hello@cuespeech.com.