Is Rubidu private? Check it yourself
Everything Rubidu does with your voice happens on your Mac: speech recognition, the AI model and the voice. You should not have to take that on trust, so here is how to check.
Three ways to check
- Turn Wi-Fi off. Talk to Rubidu. Timers, apps, volume, notes, questions and dictation all still work.
- Watch the connections. Use any free network monitor (for example Apple's own Activity Monitor, Network tab, or a firewall such as Little Snitch or LuLu) while you use Rubidu. It makes no connections while you talk to it. The only time it uses the internet is when you press a button to download a model, or ask it to search the web.
- Read the permission list. Rubidu asks for the microphone, input monitoring (for the push-to-talk keys), accessibility (to press shortcuts and type what you dictate) and screen recording (only when you ask it to read the screen). Each one says what stops working without it, and each can be removed again in one press from the Rubidu window under Your Mac.
What Rubidu stores, and where
Only on your Mac: your settings, the voices you made, and, if you ask it to "remember that ...", those notes. You can see and erase them in the Rubidu window. Screen text and documents are read to you or summarised and are never saved. There is no account, no analytics and no tracking.
What it cannot promise
Rubidu is closed-source software, so you cannot read its code the way you can with an open-source tool. That is why the checks above matter: they show what it actually does on your Mac. No software can honestly promise it is free of every flaw.
Questions
Does Rubidu send my voice anywhere?
No. Speech is turned into text on your Mac and the audio is not kept.
Does it need the internet?
No. Its models come inside the app. It goes online only when you ask it to look something up (Wikipedia, arXiv, or a web search with your own key), and each of those has its own switch in Settings, Online.