Your voice, your device, your text — no server in between. Hovor's on-device Parakeet model transcribes speech entirely on your Mac or iPhone, without sending a single byte of audio to the cloud.
Most voice dictation products record your audio, compress it, send it to a data centre somewhere, run a speech model on remote hardware, and return a transcript. That round-trip is invisible to you, but it happens on every single phrase you dictate.
On-device is different. When Hovor's Parakeet mode is active, the speech model runs directly on your Mac or iPhone — on the same chip you are holding or typing on. The raw audio is captured locally, processed locally, and discarded locally once the transcript is ready. No packet carrying your voice leaves your machine.
This is not a privacy policy promise — it is an architectural fact. There is no network call to intercept, no server log to audit, no third-party infrastructure to trust.
Cloud dictation is convenient, but it comes with an implicit assumption: the company running the server can, in principle, access what you say. Even with strong encryption in transit and privacy commitments in writing, the audio reaches someone else's hardware.
On-device removes that assumption entirely. If you are dictating:
…the question "who can hear this?" has a simple answer: only you. The audio never reaches Hovor's server. It never reaches any server.
For users subject to professional confidentiality obligations — lawyers, doctors, therapists, journalists — on-device dictation is not just a preference. It is often the only architecture that satisfies their obligations.
A second benefit follows directly from the first: offline dictation keeps working when your connection does not.
On a long-haul flight. On a train through a tunnel. In a basement office with poor signal. In a country with unpredictable mobile coverage. In a meeting room where IT policy blocks outbound traffic. Wherever cloud dictation fails or becomes unreliable, on-device Parakeet keeps transcribing at the same quality.
There is no spinner, no "waiting for server" delay, no degraded fallback mode. The model is already on your device, and it runs whether or not a router is nearby.
Hovor uses Parakeet v3, an open speech recognition model developed by NVIDIA and released under the CC-BY-4.0 licence. To be clear about credit: Hovor did not train this model. NVIDIA did. What Hovor does is select the strongest open model for European languages, ship it alongside the app, and engineer the surrounding pipeline so it works well in real-world conditions.
Parakeet was trained on 24 European languages with balanced representation across them — meaning Ukrainian audio was given the same training attention as German or French, not treated as an afterthought. The model handles apostrophes correctly (м'ясо, об'єкт), preserves soft signs (день, тінь), and follows Ukrainian capitalization rules rather than mistakenly applying English conventions. On macOS it runs via Apple Neural Engine acceleration, which keeps it both fast and battery-efficient.
Parakeet is multilingual across European languages. If you dictate in English, Ukrainian, Polish, French, German, or several other European languages, the same local model handles all of them — no switching required.
Hovor selects and ships Parakeet; it does not fine-tune or modify it. The quality reflects NVIDIA's engineering on the model, and Hovor's engineering on the pipeline around it.
On-device Parakeet is available on macOS and iOS (on iPhones with sufficient RAM — the device gate is approximately 4 GB). It is not currently available on other platforms.
Free-tier cloud dictation (2,000 words per week) uses Hovor's server and works without Local Unlock. Offline on-device dictation is a benefit of Local Unlock — a one-time purchase at $49.99 / 1,999 UAH, family-shareable, available through the App Store (iOS and macOS) and via Monobank on the web.
Local Unlock also includes unlimited dictionary replacements, snippets, and custom workflows — it is a single purchase that covers all the features that run entirely on your device.
To switch to on-device mode after purchasing:
A few practical details before you switch:
Download Hovor for Mac or iPhone. Free tier includes 2,000 cloud words/week. Local Unlock adds unlimited on-device Parakeet — one-time purchase, family-shareable, no subscription.
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