Anywhere you can type, you can speak. Your ideas stay private, on your Mac.

An Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or later) running macOS 13.0 or later, plus standard macOS Microphone & Accessibility permissions so text can be typed directly at your cursor, is everything dictation itself needs.

AI cleanup needs macOS 26 with Apple Intelligence; dictation itself works on macOS 13+.

Zero data egress by design. Audio and text never leave your machine, and no telemetry tracks your dictation. Most licence checks after activation happen entirely on your own Mac, with no server involved. Tessen makes five kinds of deliberate network call and no others: an update check (off by default — it runs when you click Check for Updates… or switch the automatic check on), a one-time trial start (and once more when the trial ends, to move this Mac to the Free plan), a one-time licence activation — which sends your key and this Mac’s device identifier to our server once to bind the licence, and returns a token every later check verifies locally — a licence refresh only in the final three days before a paid licence’s local expiry window, and — only if you choose to download an additional speech-recognition engine — a speech model download, which carries no identifier of any kind. Every one of the first four carries at most a licence token, a device identifier, and a version number — never anything you spoke or typed. A local, plain-text history is kept on your Mac so the Hub can show past sessions — you can turn it off or delete it any time. Full detail in the Privacy Policy.

You get 14 full days of unrestricted Pro access on your own voice. No credit card, no payment details at all — just download and start dictating. Test on-device speech recognition, polish, and custom trade dictionaries on your real work.

Nothing to do, and nothing is ever charged automatically — when your 14-day trial ends, you move onto the Free plan without any action from you. Want to keep everything Pro instead? Upgrade any time to Pro Monthly ($9/mo) or Pro Yearly ($69/yr) from the app or this page.

2,000 words a week, Dictation in any app, and Jargon awareness from the text field you are typing in (off by default) and your own dictionary. No card, no time limit, and no charge, ever, unless you choose to upgrade. Pro adds Unlimited words, AI cleanup, Industry vocabulary packs — legal, medical, finance, software, Per-app rules, and A personal model built from your own dictation history, entirely on your Mac (macOS 26 requires switching Engine to “Adaptive”, off by default).

No — one trial per Mac. Once a Mac's trial has been used, downloading the app again drops straight to the Free plan; choose Monthly or Yearly to unlock Pro again.

Yes. You can transcribe local audio or video files into formatted transcripts or timestamped subtitle files using the built-in local engine — completely offline.

If you need a dedicated transcription studio with multi-speaker diarization and timeline editing, specialized multi-track audio suites are a natural companion.

Cloud-based dictation services charge $120–$180 every year, and every sentence you speak is uploaded to external GPU servers, creating continuous compute costs and privacy trade-offs.

Tessen runs entirely on your Mac. Because your own device does all the work, your voice stays completely private and you never pay an ongoing server tax.

Retrieve it yourself in about ten seconds: open gettessen.com/thank-you and enter the email address you paid with together with the Key ID on that purchase’s receipt (it starts with cs_ or in_). A renewal is charged on a schedule rather than at a checkout, so there is no page that hands you the key the way a first purchase does — that box is the route, and the key is issued the moment you are billed.

The box returns any key our system could not send you: a renewal key, or a first-purchase key if the email carrying it ever fails. If it finds nothing, email support@gettessen.com from your billing address and we will send your key to you.

Four deliberate decisions, stated once:

No account, and no cross-device sync. There is nothing to log into and nothing to sync.

Tessen runs on Apple Silicon Macs only.

Tessen does not capture meeting or system audio. That would require the macOS Screen Recording permission, and Tessen does not request it.

Tessen carries no enterprise compliance certifications — no SOC 2, no HIPAA. Processing on your own Mac is not a certification.