Is AI note taking safe?

That depends on what a given tool does with the recording, which is why this page lists ours rather than reassuring you. With Dalm: the audio is recognised on your Mac and deleted the moment the text exists, and it is never uploaded. The text is a different matter — it syncs to our servers automatically, and it reaches a third-party language model, which writes the summary after every meeting by itself, and documents and answers when you ask. Both halves are true at once, and a tool that tells you only the first one is telling you half.

Is it safe to record meetings with AI?

The technical answer is above. The part that is not technical: recording a conversation involves people who are not you, and the rules for that differ by where you and they are sitting. Before your first recording Dalm shows a note on recording and consent and suggests saying out loud that you are recording; the app itself tells nobody else, so telling them is yours to do. What the law requires where you work is a separate question with its own page.

Is the recording deleted after it is transcribed?

Yes. The audio file goes the moment the transcript exists, and there is no setting to keep it.

If I cancel my subscription, do I keep my data?

Yes. Cancelling ends the paid plan, not the records: you keep reading, searching and exporting everything you already have. What the paid plans add is on pricing. Deleting your account is a separate, deliberate action, and what it removes is set out on this page under where your data is kept.

How do I turn off the AI meeting notes?

Recording never starts on its own, so the usual answer is simply not to start one: there is no automatic capture to switch off. While a meeting records, the menu bar icon carries a dot and the recording screen shows a timer; Stop ends it. What cannot be switched off is the syncing of text that already exists — that is a property of the product rather than a setting, and it is better to know it here than to look for the toggle.

Can I share a summary as a link?

No. "Share" hands the document's text, in Markdown, to the macOS share menu — mail, Messages, AirDrop — so what goes out is a copy you send yourself. There is no page on our side that shows a summary to someone without the app. We do not mail summaries to meeting participants; an email from us is an invitation you made or a meeting reminder, not the notes.

What we do with your recordings, and what we never do

Audio never leaves your Mac. The text does — automatically, because that is how your notes reach your other devices. Everything below is versioned and dated.

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Audio never leaves this Mac. Speech is recognised locally and the audio file is deleted the moment the text exists. The text does leave: the transcript syncs to our servers automatically, from the moment of the recording, and there is no setting that stops it — an account is required and the app does not open without one. That text also goes to a third party, whose language model writes the summary after every meeting by itself, and documents and answers when you ask. No usage statistics are sent. The text stays on our servers until you delete it.

What do we commit to?

The audio does not leave the device. Recognition is local and the audio file goes as soon as the transcript exists.
Voice prints stay on the device. Telling voices apart uses an embedding — a vector of the voice. It is stored on the machine and never travels: there is no such field in the sync and no such column on the server. The vector is not erased by naming someone; it lives as long as the meeting does.
Private by default. Everything created is private when it is created. Your dictations are visible only to you, even inside a team — not to its owner and not to a moderator. We do not mail summaries, transcripts or documents to anyone. Apart from a welcome email when you sign up, the emails we send are invitations you make — to your team or to one meeting — and meeting reminders; these carry a name and a link, not the record. There is no way to publish a record at an address anyone can open: “Share” sends a copy of the text through the macOS share menu. This is about other people seeing your records — the sync to our own servers is described below, and it is automatic.
No usage statistics. The app sends no usage statistics. There is an anonymous-statistics checkbox in settings, off by default; in this version it only stores your choice.
Price and limits do not get worse while you renew. Once you subscribe, your price and limits won’t get worse for as long as your subscription keeps renewing. The numbers behind this live in the fair limits policy, dated and versioned.

We do not train models on your text: there is no training or fine-tuning of any model in our code. What the model provider does with the text under its own terms we have not yet confirmed, so this page makes no claim about it.

What leaves this Mac, and where does it go?

To our servers goes the text of the transcript — utterances with their timestamps and voice numbers — along with your notes, documents and tags. It goes automatically, from the moment of the recording, without a separate action from you. The sync cannot be switched off: an account is required, and without signing in the application window does not open at all.

Files you add — materials attached to a meeting and files attached to a question in chat — go to our servers too, as separate files. They are kept in the EU, in private storage that opens only through signed links. Audio is never among them.

To a third-party language model the text goes at three moments: when a conversation is processed, when you ask a question in chat, and when a document is assembled. What is sent is the transcript with its utterances, your own notes and the names you gave the voices; a question adds the conversation so far and the question itself; a document adds the assembled result. No audio is sent in any of the three.

Never leaves: the sound itself, the voice embeddings, the timing of each word, and your application settings.

What do we never do?

Mail summaries, transcripts or documents to meeting participants or anyone else.
Make anything public by default.
Record without a rule you set, or without showing that a recording started.
Cap recording minutes, recording length, or how long anything is kept.
Cut the terms of an account after the fact.
Renew an upsell without asking.
Set advertising cookies on this site, or let Google Analytics set its cookies before you accept them. What the site counts, and how to refuse it, is under cookies and analytics.

Where is it kept, and for how long?

The audio is on the device until the transcript exists, and then it is gone. A file you import stays where it was: Dalm reads a copy and deletes that copy. The voice embeddings and the settings are on the device and stay there. The text is on both: locally, where search runs against it, and on our servers, where summaries and documents are assembled. The full row-by-row breakdown is on how it works — it exists in one copy, and this is not it.

There is no retention clock on our side: the text stays on our servers until you delete the meeting or your account. A deleted meeting waits 30 days in Recently deleted, where you can restore it. At the end of those 30 days the meeting and its files are erased from our database and file storage. A file you attach to a question in chat but never send is removed after one day. Copies in our backups can stay for up to 30 days longer. One exception we know of: the records of how the language model processed a meeting can keep fragments of its text after that. We are fixing it, and until then we do not call deletion complete.

Deleting your account removes from our servers your dictations and every workspace where you were the only member, with its meetings. Like a deleted meeting, they wait 30 days before they are erased, and copies in our backups can stay for up to 30 days longer. Meetings you recorded inside a team organisation stay with that organisation, with their transcripts; your name is removed from them.

Nothing is recorded automatically. A recording starts because you start it, or with one click from the notification before a scheduled conversation. While a meeting records, the menu bar icon carries a dot and the recording screen shows a timer; Stop ends it. Before your first recording the app shows a note on recording and consent and suggests saying out loud that you are recording. The app itself tells nobody else — nothing is posted to the call or its chat — so asking is yours to do, before the recording rather than partway through.

What the law requires where you are sitting is a different question, and it has its own page: recording consent laws.

What should you ask any vendor?

Seven questions worth asking before trusting a tool with your conversations. The same seven are listed on how it works as a tool for choosing; here each one carries our answer.

Question	Our answer
Where does speech recognition happen?	On your Mac, in both accuracy models
Is the audio kept after transcription, and for how long?	No. It goes the moment the text exists; there is no setting to keep it
Are models trained on customer data?	Not by us: there is no training or fine-tuning in our code. For the model provider’s side, see the commitments above
What exactly goes into telemetry?	No usage statistics are sent. The checkbox in settings only stores your choice
Who can open a shared link, and can it be revoked?	There are no share links: “Share” sends a copy of the document’s text through the macOS share menu, and no page on our side shows it to anyone
What happens to the data when the subscription ends?	It stays reachable: cancelling ends the paid plan, not the records
Are the numeric limits published with a date and a version?	Yes, in the fair limits policy

What do we not claim?

Four things we are not, stated plainly because the temptation to imply them is real and the cost of being caught is public.

There is no SOC 2 certification.
There is no signed BAA under HIPAA, and no claim of HIPAA compliance.
The term end-to-end encryption is not used here, because it would not be accurate for text that our servers read in order to build your documents.
Data residency in the EU is not offered as a feature.

Which cookies and analytics does this site use?

Two analytics services count visits to this website. Neither runs inside the app, and neither sees your meetings.

Cloudflare Web Analytics runs on every page. It sets no cookies and uses no browser storage; it counts page views, where a visit came from and how fast the page loaded.
Google Analytics runs only after you choose Accept in the cookie notice. Then it sets its own cookies (named _ga) to tell one visitor from another, and counts the pages you open. We also send it three events: the waitlist form was sent, a template was downloaded, a link to pricing was followed. None of them carries your email address or what you typed.

Reject in the same notice, and Google Analytics never loads. To change your mind later, open Cookie settings at the bottom of any page; choosing Reject there removes its cookies. The forms also get a security cookie from Cloudflare Turnstile, which tells people from bots and is not used for counting.

Where to go next

How it works — the full row-by-row data boundary.
The fair limits policy — every number, dated and versioned.
Local against cloud — the trade-off itself.
Offline transcription — what runs without a network.
Meeting notes without a bot — capture with nothing joining the call.
Recording consent laws — the rules where you work.
Pricing — what is free and what Pro adds.

Dalm is operated by Ilya Novikov. Questions about your data go to hello@dalm.ai.

Questions

Is AI note taking safe?: That depends on what a given tool does with the recording, which is why this page lists ours rather than reassuring you. With Dalm: the audio is recognised on your Mac and deleted the moment the text exists, and it is never uploaded. The text is a different matter — it syncs to our servers automatically, and it reaches a third-party language model, which writes the summary after every meeting by itself, and documents and answers when you ask. Both halves are true at once, and a tool that tells you only the first one is telling you half.
Is it safe to record meetings with AI?: The technical answer is above. The part that is not technical: recording a conversation involves people who are not you, and the rules for that differ by where you and they are sitting. Before your first recording Dalm shows a note on recording and consent and suggests saying out loud that you are recording; the app itself tells nobody else, so telling them is yours to do. What the law requires where you work is a separate question with its own page.
Is the recording deleted after it is transcribed?: Yes. The audio file goes the moment the transcript exists, and there is no setting to keep it.
If I cancel my subscription, do I keep my data?: Yes. Cancelling ends the paid plan, not the records: you keep reading, searching and exporting everything you already have. What the paid plans add is on pricing. Deleting your account is a separate, deliberate action, and what it removes is set out on this page under where your data is kept.
How do I turn off the AI meeting notes?: Recording never starts on its own, so the usual answer is simply not to start one: there is no automatic capture to switch off. While a meeting records, the menu bar icon carries a dot and the recording screen shows a timer; Stop ends it. What cannot be switched off is the syncing of text that already exists — that is a property of the product rather than a setting, and it is better to know it here than to look for the toggle.
Can I share a summary as a link?: No. "Share" hands the document's text, in Markdown, to the macOS share menu — mail, Messages, AirDrop — so what goes out is a copy you send yourself. There is no page on our side that shows a summary to someone without the app. We do not mail summaries to meeting participants; an email from us is an invitation you made or a meeting reminder, not the notes.

Version and changes

Version 5 · Last changed 2 November 2026

2 November 2026 — Site analytics described: Cloudflare Web Analytics without cookies, and Google Analytics only after you accept.
1 November 2026 — Named who operates the service.
19 October 2026 — Cookies stated: no analytics or tracking cookies; a Cloudflare Turnstile security cookie on the forms.
18 October 2026 — Deleting a meeting described as the code does it, with the one exception we know of. Team meetings on account deletion stated. Open questions removed rather than left as placeholders.
8 October 2026 — Corrected: no usage statistics are sent. Described the third-party model and what it receives. Deleting a meeting and an account described exactly.
20 September 2026 — First draft. Nothing here has been published yet.