Privacy¶

The Short Version¶

Hermes collects nothing. Your audio and transcripts never leave your Mac.

What Hermes Does¶

• Captures system audio and microphone audio locally using macOS Core Audio APIs.
• Transcribes audio on-device using WhisperKit running on Apple Neural Engine.
• Stores transcripts locally in a SwiftData/SQLite database at ~/Library/Application Support/Hermes/.

What Hermes Does NOT Do¶

• No network calls — Hermes makes zero network requests during operation. The app has no network entitlements.
• No analytics or telemetry — no usage tracking, no crash reporting, no beacons.
• No cloud storage — transcripts are never uploaded anywhere.
• No third-party services — no OpenAI, no Google, no AWS, no anything.
• No microphone access when not recording — the mic is only active during an explicit recording session that you start and stop.

WhisperKit Model Download¶

The only network activity is the one-time download of the WhisperKit transcription model (~626 MB) on first launch. This is fetched from the Hugging Face Hub and cached locally. After that, Hermes never needs the network again.

Data Location¶

All persistent data lives at:

~/Library/Application Support/Hermes/

You can delete this folder at any time to remove all stored sessions and transcripts.

Source Code¶

Hermes is open source. You can audit the code yourself at github.com/TheWinterShadow/Hermes.