Privacy
Last updated October 18, 2026
In short: your voice is turned into text on your Mac and never uploaded. If you turn on AI features, Bolo sends the text they need straight to the AI provider you chose, with your own key. Bolo has no accounts, no analytics and no server listening to you.
Who we are
Bolo is made by Puru Kumar, an independent developer in Canada. For anything about privacy, including access or deletion requests, write to contact@heybolo.app.
The Bolo app
Stays on your Mac
- Your voice. Speech is recognised by models on your Mac. Audio is never sent anywhere.
- Your history, notes, Words and settings, in
~/Library/Application Support/Bolo. Delete them any time in Settings → Privacy & data. - Your AI keys, in the macOS Keychain.
Sent only when you use an AI feature, directly from your Mac to the provider you picked in Settings → AI (Google, Groq, OpenRouter, OpenAI or your own server), over HTTPS, with your key:
- Ask: your question, and any text you have selected when you ask.
- Title and tidy notes: a note's text, when that's on.
- AI writing styles: what you dictate, only in the kinds of app you set to an AI style.
- Smart formatting with your AI: dictations with something to format (or, with Full clean-up, of 8 words or more).
Each of these is off until you choose it, or runs on your Mac with Apple Intelligence instead. Bolo shows what's sent, and where, in Settings → Privacy & data. What a provider does with that text is governed by its terms; free tiers (Google's especially) may keep it and use it to improve their products, so don't send anything sensitive on a free key.
Downloads and updates
- Speech models come from Hugging Face, once. Hugging Face sees the download request.
- Once a day Bolo asks heybolo.app whether there's a new version. The request carries Bolo's version number and what any web request carries (your IP address), nothing else. You can turn this off in Settings → About.
To shape writing for the app you're in, Bolo reads which app is in front, and a browser window's title, when you start dictating. It never reads password fields.
This website
- No sign-up: you download Bolo without giving an email or making an account.
- Visits and downloads: we count them per day, by country and by the site that sent you. No cookies, and nothing stored per visitor. Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies, measures page performance.
- Hosting: the site, downloads and update feed run on Cloudflare, which processes requests to serve them.
- Email: if you write to us, we use your email only to reply, and delete it when you ask.
Your choices
- Turn any AI feature off in Settings → AI, and Bolo sends nothing.
- Delete history and notes in Settings → Privacy & data. Deleting removes them from your Mac, including any copy Bolo kept of a damaged file.
- Ask us anything about your information at contact@heybolo.app.
Security
Found a security problem? Email contact@heybolo.app with “Security” in the subject. Please don't post it publicly until it's fixed.
Changes
If this changes, we'll update this page and the date above, and say so in the app's release notes when it affects the app.