These principles compound. None of them stands alone, and each makes the others easier to keep. When a decision is hard, we walk it through all five. The right answer is the one that respects every one.
We ship less, done exceptionally well, instead of more, done adequately. Every option is one more thing to think about. Every setting is a knob that can be set wrong. Every menu item is a paragraph of documentation and a support burden.
So when a competitor has a feature ploca does not, the answer is often that ploca deliberately does not have it. We write down why, rather than reflexively adding it. The absence is the design.
Apps that promise privacy in a policy ask you to trust them. ploca does the opposite. Privacy is built into the architecture, so trust is not required. You can watch its network activity with a tool like Little Snitch and verify the silence yourself.
Audio is in memory only because there is no code that writes it to disk. Transcripts do not leave the machine because there is no code that sends them. Telemetry is not switched off; it was never built. Any feature that would need data to leave the machine, or a new permission, has to be defended explicitly against this principle.
We pick a narrow lane and make it exceptional. ploca runs on Apple Silicon and macOS 13 or later. No Intel Mac, no Windows, no Linux. One push-to-talk key. Two speech engines, each built for one job: a fast one for English, an accurate one for everything else, with a single speed-or-accuracy choice instead of a model picker. A small set of language modes, tuned deliberately for how people actually speak.
The cost is real: anyone outside that lane cannot use ploca. The benefit is real too. Anyone inside it gets a tool built for them specifically. Indian-mode dictation is not Whisper with a Hindi prompt. It is a vocabulary pack tuned for code-switched speech.
ploca describes what it does, not how it should make you feel. Never powerful, never seamless, never effortless. Marketing buzzwords are a tell that a product cannot speak for itself.
We trust you to recognise value when you see it, and we do not hide the trade-offs. Lists are English-only for now. The build is around 180 MB, and the first launch downloads a speech model sized to your Mac, a gigabyte or three more. We say so plainly. In a market full of noise, calm reads as substance.
Settings exist for preferences that genuinely matter, not as a hedge against picking the right default ourselves. ploca chooses the right engine and the right injection method so you do not have to. The first time you open it, you should be dictating within minutes, not configuring.
A new setting needs a real reason to exist. "Some people might prefer this" is not enough. "Without this, a whole group of people hits a wall and quits" is. The aim is that most people never open Settings at all.
A pen's job is to write. Not to remember. Not to transmit.
A voice-to-text app should act like a pen. It should hear you and write it down, and nothing more. There are already plenty of notepads, audio archives, and second brains. Those are different products, for different jobs.
I kept looking for that pen and could not find one. I am a writer who is lazy to type, and I do not want a model generating my first draft. Every tool I tried had a trade-off I could not live with. The transcription was not good enough, the privacy was someone else's policy document, or my words were quietly training a model I would never see.
So I built ploca for myself. Since then I have been publishing at least one essay a week, thinking out loud with Claude instead of typing, and getting thoughts down as fast as they form. The friction is gone.
If that sounds useful to you, I would like to have you try it.
Aasif Iqbal J. · maker of ploca
ploca is a Mac app, so there is nothing to install where you are standing. Leave your email and we will send the download link for your Mac.
{{ getMsg }}
One email with your link, plus occasional notes when ploca ships something new. Never linked to your dictation, which stays on your Mac.