Dictation and privilege: where your words actually go

You would not forward a privileged memo to a vendor you had not diligenced. Dictating one into an app is the same act, performed faster and with less thought.

The convenience is real. Speaking a first draft is two to three times faster than typing one, and the version you say aloud usually has a better structure than the version you type — you argue in paragraphs and you type in fragments. That is why dictation keeps coming back.

The problem is that almost every modern dictation tool is a thin client in front of somebody else's transcription API. When you press the hotkey and describe your client's position on a settlement, that audio is uploaded, processed on hardware you have never seen, and returned as text. The tool is not doing the work. A third party is.

Three questions worth asking

1. Is a network request made at all?

Not “is it encrypted” — everything is encrypted, and encryption in transit protects the material from third parties on the wire, not from the recipient. The question is whether the audio leaves the machine. For most tools the answer is yes, always, by design, and there is no setting that changes it.

This is the only question with a binary answer, which is why it is worth asking first. Everything after it is a matter of degree.

2. What is retained, and for how long?

Retention policies range from “discarded when the response returns” to “kept indefinitely to improve the service.” Both are written in the same reassuring register. The second one means your client's name is sitting in a corpus somewhere.

Ask specifically about logs, which are frequently carved out of retention promises. A vendor can honestly say it does not store your audio while retaining request logs that include transcript text for debugging.

3. Is any of it used for training?

Training use is the one that does not decay. A retained file can be deleted; a model trained on your work product cannot be untrained. If a vendor's answer involves the words “unless you opt out,” find the toggle and check whether it is on.

A policy is a promise; absence is a fact

Here is the distinction that matters for privileged material, and it is not a marketing distinction.

A retention policy is a statement about future behaviour by a company whose terms can change, whose infrastructure can be breached, whose staff can err, and whose records can be compelled. It may be an excellent policy. It is still a promise, and relying on it means you have accepted a party into the chain of custody for material you told a client was confidential.

No network request is not a stronger promise. It is the absence of the situation the promise was needed for. There is no recipient, no retention window, no subprocessor, no log, no breach surface, and nobody to serve with process.

How Walkie handles this

Walkie runs dictation two ways and lets you switch per moment, which is the design decision this whole article argues for.

On-Device Mode runs the speech model on your own machine and makes no network request. This is the mode for material under privilege, under NDA, or covered by a client policy that forbids third-party processing. It is unlimited and free forever, on every plan, with no account required — the privacy tier is not the paid tier.

Cloud Mode sends audio for transcription under Zero Data Retention: processed, returned, discarded, not logged. Nothing is ever used to train AI models on any tier, contractually. It is faster and it punctuates better. Use it for the writing where polish matters more than secrecy.

What this looks like on a Tuesday

• Client call notes — On-Device Mode, dictated the moment the call ends, while the impression is intact.
• Deposition summaries — On-Device Mode, with the transcript open beside you.
• Memo and brief first drafts — On-Device Mode if the matter is sensitive; editing a full draft beats an empty page either way.
• Time entries — either mode. Dictate them daily instead of reconstructing the week on Friday.
• General correspondence — Cloud Mode, for the punctuation and the filler-word removal.

Your custom dictionary applies in both modes, so party names, defined terms, and the citations your practice uses come out spelled correctly without a cloud round-trip.

Where Walkie will not satisfy your IT department

There is no SSO, no SCIM provisioning, and no admin console. A firm running a formal procurement checklist will find rows Walkie cannot fill, and it is better to know that now than three meetings in. On the other hand, On-Device Mode requires no account at all, which is occasionally an easier approval than a full vendor review.

Questions