When modern AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini first started arriving, our founder was completely fascinated. He spent hours learning new things, chatting with AI, and typing out long thoughts, prompts, and questions on his keyboard. He wrote and typed constantly to explore ideas and understand what AI could do.
Around that time, he discovered a popular voice-to-text dictation tool. And to be completely honest, he became a crazy fan of it.
Instead of constantly writing and typing on a keyboard, this tool gave him the freedom to talk to his computer and phone directly, in his own native language, whenever an idea popped into his mind. He loved it so much that he started using it like crazy. Talking became his daily habit. Instead of hunting and pecking on a keyboard, he communicated almost everything with his voice.
He loved that tool. But after using it for months, two serious problems started happening.
Losing 5 to 7 minutes of deep thought because of Wi-Fi.
Where our founder lives, there is sometimes a network issue. Because that tool was completely cloud-based, every single second of speech required an active internet connection.
A lot of times, he would hold down the hotkey and speak for 5 minutes, or even 7 minutes straight—sharing a deep, thoughtful idea that he had spent hours thinking through. Then he would release the hotkey, only to find that nothing was recorded.
Because of weak internet or a small network hiccup, 7 full minutes of deep human thought were completely lost and wasted. He couldn't get those thoughts back.
He started asking himself: Why can't I just use this offline? Why can't my Mac transcribe my voice directly on my machine?
Problem #2: The Privacy Shock Inside the App
The second issue hit him even harder.
Our founder is naturally a very private person. He doesn't share his private life on social media—he has never liked that concept. He believes personal thoughts and private life should stay private.
One day, he opened the software and looked through the app and its dashboard. As he scrolled, he saw that the tool had captured and displayed months of everything he had spoken. Every thought, every private conversation, every sensitive business idea was sitting right there in front of him.
Seeing all of that displayed inside the app made him feel deeply uncomfortable. He thought: If this app is showing months of my voice right here on the screen, then all this data is sitting on their cloud servers.
Speaking from the heart, but wondering who has the data.
Around the same time, he kept reading news on the internet about how tech companies sell user data to third parties, or use customer data to train AI models. Even within dictation software, there were settings and policies about using data to train models.
For months, he had been speaking very sensitive things straight from his heart. The thought that his private speech was living on a remote server—and had the potential to be shared with other companies or used to train AI models without his real control—hurt him deeply.
The Dilemma: Addicted to Voice, but Desperate for Privacy
He was stuck in a very tough situation. Because of this popular voice-to-text tool, he had developed a strong daily habit of talking and communicating instead of typing. He couldn't stop himself from using his voice—it had become part of who he was as a thinker and builder.
He couldn't go back to typing. But he refused to keep using software that stored his personal life on a cloud server.
So he decided to build the solution himself.
Step by Step: How Valcy Was Born
He didn't build Valcy as a giant business project at first. He started building it simply because he needed a tool he could personally trust.
Slowly, with small achievements every week, he figured out how to bring OpenAI’s Whisper model directly onto Apple Silicon chips on the Mac.
He built two simple options into the app:
Everything runs directly on your Mac using your Apple chip. No internet connection is needed at all. You can talk for 10 minutes without worrying about Wi-Fi drops, and not a single word ever leaves your laptop.
When you want quick cloud transcription, your speech is turned into text and deleted immediately. We don't save your audio files to disk, we don't keep an archive of your life, and we never use your words to train AI models.
The Result: Sleeping Peacefully at Night
The reason our founder created Valcy is simple: he wanted to talk as much as he wanted, share whatever was in his heart, and sleep peacefully at night knowing his data was safe.
Now, he uses Valcy every single day. There is no thought in his mind that a company is recording his voice, storing his transcripts on their servers, or selling his data to others.
That is why we built Valcy, and that is why we are sharing it with you. If you love speaking your thoughts, but you also care about your privacy and want software you can depend on even without Wi-Fi—Valcy was built for you.