The Tavla manifesto
No AI. Just your words.
Every writing app is racing to add AI. Tavla is built on the opposite promise.
No AI features. Not now, not ever.
No autocomplete that finishes your sentences. No assistant in the margin. No “rewrite this for me.” The words on the page are yours, from the first to the last.
The word tools are a dictionary, not a generator.
Synonyms, opposites, rhymes, and meanings come from open dictionaries — WordNet and the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary — bundled inside the app. They look words up. They never invent them for you.
Your words never train a model.
Nothing you write is collected, sent, or fed to any AI — by Tavla or anyone else. It can’t be: nothing you write, and nothing you look up, ever leaves your Mac.
Writing is thinking.
A tool that writes for you isn’t a writing tool. Tavla guards the part that matters — the quiet, deliberate work of finding the next true sentence — and stays out of the way of the rest.
This is a choice, and it costs something: a fixed dictionary can’t do what a model can. For the writers Tavla is built for, that trade is the whole point.