The five providers, plus anything else
YapScribe speaks to OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Google Gemini and xAI with a key of your own. Paste the key in Settings and pay that company directly; you pay us nothing further for polishing, for ever.
The sixth choice is not a company. Custom endpoint is any service that speaks OpenAI’s chat format — Ollama, LM Studio, vLLM, a gateway your employer runs. You give it a base URL and a model name.
Each provider starts on its own fast, cheap tier of model, and you can change which model in Settings. That default is a product decision rather than a cost-saving one: polishing sits between you finishing a sentence and seeing it appear, and a frontier model would spend a second of that deciding where a comma goes.
Local polish (advanced)
Fully offline polish with Ollama or LM Studio. Nothing leaves this Mac.
Install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a
small model, pick Local polish (advanced) in Settings, and press Test.
The base URL and model name are already filled in — http://localhost:11434/v1
and llama3.2 for Ollama; LM Studio serves the same format on port 1234.
From then on no part of a dictation leaves your Mac: not the audio, not the screenshot, not the words read off your screen, and not your text. YapScribe reaches that model over your Mac’s own loopback connection, which no other computer can see.
It is marked advanced for three honest reasons: the model is yours to download
(ollama pull llama3.2 is about 2 GB); the first request after an idle spell
pauses while the model loads, which is why the Test button is worth pressing
before your first real dictation; and a small model on a laptop punctuates well
but occasionally rewrites more than it should.
Your wordlist survives either way. The enforcement pass runs after polishing and does not depend on which model ran — or on any model running at all.
The address decides, not the label
YapScribe offers the “nothing leaves this Mac” sentence on the strength of the URL, never on the strength of you having picked the preset. Point the local preset at a machine on your network and it is a network destination like any other, and the app says so instead.
Apple Intelligence, on macOS 26 and later
The model built into macOS does the polishing. Nothing leaves this Mac, and there is nothing to install.
On macOS 26 and later, with Apple Intelligence switched on, the Polish tab has a row called Apple Intelligence (on this Mac). It needs no key, no download and no Ollama: the model is part of the system.
It is the one setting in YapScribe where nothing leaves this computer and no network request is made at all — not even the loopback one the local preset above makes. Nothing goes anywhere: not your audio, not your screenshot, not the words read off your screen, not the words you have saved, not what you typed on the Apps tab, and not your text.
Its cost is accuracy, and it is the one cost this app has measured. The row says so where you choose it: “it is the least accurate polish YapScribe offers. It tidies punctuation and grammar and removes most fillers, but it does not fix mid-sentence corrections (“Tuesday, no, Wednesday”), which the cloud models do, and when it is wrong it can drop words. Read what it wrote before you send it.“ The row reads the same on macOS 26 and macOS 27.
Your wordlist survives here too. The enforcement pass runs after polishing, as it does everywhere else.
Below macOS 26 the row is not there at all, rather than there and apologetic.
Where your keys live
In your Mac’s Keychain — one entry per provider, filed under YapScribe, which you can see and delete yourself in Keychain Access. Never in a preferences file, never in a file in Application Support, and never in a log line.
Your keys never reach our servers. With a key of your own, YapScribe’s servers are not in the conversation at all.
What actually gets sent
Whatever you choose, the app says which of these is happening, in one sentence, in Settings, before it sends anything. The short version:
- Polishing off — nothing leaves this Mac at all.
- Local polish — nothing leaves this Mac at all.
- Apple Intelligence (on this Mac) — nothing leaves this Mac at all, and no network request is made for a dictation either.
- Your own key — the transcribed text of each dictation goes to the provider you chose, with your saved and learned words, any instructions you wrote for that app, and a short list of words read off your screen, so names come out spelled your way. Their terms cover it.
- YapScribe Cloud credits — the same goes through our server to a model provider and back, and nothing is stored on the way.
Your screenshot and your audio are never sent, on any of these paths. The Trust ledger is the same thing as a table, row by row.