Where your meeting data actually goes

When TinyScribe records a meeting, the audio is captured and stored on your Mac — nowhere else. It sits in TinyScribe's own storage on your disk, in the format your Mac already uses for compressed audio.

Audio is deleted according to the retention setting you choose — the moment the transcript exists, after 3, 7 or 365 days, or never. You can also delete a recording's audio manually at any time, independent of its transcript.

The audio file is never uploaded, never synced, and never sent to us or to Apple.

The transcript

The transcript is created on your Mac by Apple's speech framework — SpeechAnalyzer in macOS Speech. This runs on-device: it works fully offline, with no network request involved in turning audio into text.

The transcript is stored alongside the recording on your Mac. If you have iCloud enabled, it syncs through your own private iCloud database — the same private storage your Photos or Notes use — so it is not visible to us or to anyone else. If you don't use iCloud, the transcript stays local to that Mac.

The summary

The summary is the one thing that leaves your Mac. To generate it, the transcript text is sent to Apple's Private Cloud Compute (PCC).

PCC is Apple's hardened cloud compute infrastructure, built specifically for Apple Intelligence requests. Apple states that PCC does not store the data it processes once the response is returned, and that this data is not used to train Apple's models. Apple also publishes the PCC software stack so that independent security researchers can inspect it.

Transcription happens on your Mac. Summaries go through Apple's Private Cloud Compute, where nothing is stored and nothing is used for training.

Because PCC is a cloud service, summaries need an internet connection — unlike transcription, which works offline. PCC also has daily capacity limits set by Apple. When a summary can't be generated right away — no internet, PCC unavailable, the daily limit reached — TinyScribe puts it in a queue and retries automatically, without you having to do anything. The app tells you why a summary is pending and what to expect.

What we receive: nothing

There is no server of ours in this picture. TinyScribe doesn't send analytics, telemetry, or usage data to us, and we don't operate a backend that your recordings, transcripts, or summaries pass through. The one purchase TinyScribe offers — unlocking the full version — is handled entirely by the App Store; we don't see your payment details, and there's no account or sign-in with us.

At a glance