Help & known issues

Follow the three steps on the welcome page: download the app, install it and grant the permissions the setup wizard asks for, then open Settings → Licence and paste the key from your email.

Open ploca, go to Settings → Licence, paste the key, and click Activate. It is the only thing ever sent to ploca.app; your dictation and audio never leave your Mac.

Check spam first. The key goes to the email address you used at checkout. Still nothing after a few minutes? Write to hey@ploca.app.

Yes. If ploca does not work out for you, write to hey@ploca.app within fourteen days of your purchase and we will refund it in full. No reason needed.

ploca can clip the final word if you trail off or release the hotkey too early. Hold it half a second longer after you finish. We are actively improving this.

In loud places ploca declines rather than type the wrong words. Quieter is better for now; noisy-room support is on the way.

Very quiet speech can fall below the speech-detection threshold. A soft-whisper mode is in progress; speak at a normal volume meanwhile.

If no text field was in focus, ploca copies your words to the clipboard instead. Click into a field and press ⌘V.

ploca types into whatever app has focus when you release the hotkey. Keep your target app focused until you let go.

Click Open System Settings and switch ploca back on for Microphone or Accessibility. It never needs Screen Recording or Input Monitoring.

Restart ploca from the dialog; your settings and history are safe. Often it is a Bluetooth headset. If ploca gets no audio, switch input in macOS Sound settings.

Open the menu bar icon and pick a language or a profile. Raw keeps every word as you said it, Clean removes the fillers and tidies the punctuation.

Speed mode is English only, so other languages come out as phonetic nonsense. It is the fastest engine but it cannot translate. For other languages, switch to Accuracy or an Indian mode from the menu bar icon. ploca sets a sensible default for you at setup.

Click the menu bar icon and read the status line. It names the engine that failed and the fix. If the menu offers a Re-download item, click it and ploca fetches the engine again in the background. Otherwise open Settings, go to Transcription, and select your mode again to download it. Dictation comes back the moment the engine loads.

ploca asks ploca.app once a day whether a newer version exists, and installs in place when you accept. Your settings stay put.

Nowhere. Audio and transcripts are processed on your Mac and never uploaded. Full detail on the privacy page.

No. Recording, transcription, and typing the result all happen on your Mac. Audio goes into RAM, a local speech model turns it into text, and that text lands at your cursor. The dictation path never touches the network, so nothing you say and nothing it types is ever transmitted. There is no analytics, no crash reporter and no install identifier anywhere in the app.

ploca does make a few small housekeeping requests, and none of them carry anything about you or about what you dictate. On each launch it fetches a small status file from ploca.app, and its signature, to confirm this release is still current. Once a day in the background it asks ploca.app whether a newer version exists. If you own a lifetime licence, it sends your key, and nothing else, to confirm it. On first run only, it downloads the speech model from Hugging Face, once, and never asks again. A seven-day offline grace window covers the launch checks, so ploca keeps working on a flight or behind a firewall.

Block ploca.app in Little Snitch or LuLu, then dictate. It still works, because blocking those checks does not touch the dictation path at all. Or watch nettop or lsof -i while you dictate, and you will see nothing leave your Mac. What you can observe should match exactly what is listed above, and nothing more. That is the point of writing it all down. The download is checkable too. Run shasum -a 256 on the file you downloaded and compare it with the checksum below.

The current release is Ploca-2026-10-01.dmg, and its SHA-256 is:

ce7be4bd0cff342dfe0582e0cc89573669398aa16d0929de11e3b517ae14e433

Run shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/Ploca-2026-10-01.dmg and compare. If the two do not match, do not open it, and write to hey@ploca.app.