Notes that never leave the room.
Clinicians spend their evenings typing what they already said out loud. Walkie turns speech into finished notes in whatever system you already use — and in On-Device Mode it does it without making a single network request.
You are handling protected health information — patient names, diagnoses, medication histories, and the content of a therapy hour, under HIPAA, and the plainer duty not to let a patient's worst week end up in someone else's training set. Here's exactly where it goes, tier by tier — starting with the option that sends nothing at all.
Why on-device, and not just a good policy
A cloud transcription vendor's retention policy is a promise you have to take on faith and re-verify whenever their terms change. On-Device Mode is not a stronger promise — it is the absence of one. Nothing is sent, so there is nothing to retain, subpoena, breach, or explain to a compliance officer.
What actually leaves your machine
Ranked from strongest to weakest — because these three guarantees don't mean the same thing.
The speech model runs on your own machine and makes no network request at all. There is no server to trust, no policy to read, and no log to audit — the audio has nowhere to go. This is unlimited and free forever, on every plan and with no account.
Audio is transcribed in the cloud under Zero Data Retention: the request is processed and the content is discarded when the response is returned. Walkie does not retain it. Providers are contractually bound not to train on it. Cloud Mode also sends the name of the app you are dictating into, and can send the text around the cursor so polish can format the sentence — you can switch that off. If even that is unacceptable, use On-Device Mode.
A meeting archive you can search later is, definitionally, stored. Recordings and transcripts live in your account until you delete them, and deletion is permanent. Walkie can capture and summarise a meeting entirely on-device on a Mac with Apple Intelligence — but recorded hours are metered the same either way, so on-device capture is a privacy decision, never a cheaper one.
What you would dictate
Dictate SOAP and progress notes straight into Epic, Cerner, or whatever the practice runs. Walkie types into the focused field like a keyboard, so there is no integration to approve.
Write up a session in the ten minutes between clients. On-Device Mode means the session content never becomes a network request.
Speak the letter once instead of typing it twice. Custom dictionary keeps drug names and colleagues' names spelled right.
Dictate the clinical justification rather than retyping the chart. The tedium is the point — this is the writing nobody trained for.
Answer messages by voice between appointments, in whatever tone you would have typed.
Speak the handoff at end of shift while the details are still current.
What Walkie does not do
Procurement will ask. Here first.
- Walkie is HIPAA-ready, not HIPAA-certified, and does not sign Business Associate Agreements. If your work requires a BAA, On-Device Mode removes the question instead of answering it — there is no third party to cover.
- There is no SSO, SCIM provisioning, or admin console. If your security team works from a procurement checklist, Walkie will not fill in every row.
- Recording other people is a legal question that varies by jurisdiction and often turns on consent. Walkie captures your computer's audio without joining the participant list, which makes telling people you are recording your job, not the app's.
Questions
Walkie is HIPAA-ready: cloud requests run under Zero Data Retention and nothing is ever used to train AI models. It is not HIPAA-certified and Walkie does not sign Business Associate Agreements. For work that requires a BAA, use On-Device Mode — it makes no network request, so there is no business associate involved.
Not in On-Device Mode. The speech model runs locally and makes no network request, so the audio has nowhere to go. In Cloud Mode audio is sent for transcription under Zero Data Retention and discarded when the response returns.
Meetings are stored by design — a searchable archive is a stored archive — so recordings and transcripts live in your account until you delete them. Walkie can capture and summarise a meeting entirely on-device on a Mac with Apple Intelligence. For visits, most clinicians should dictate the note rather than record the patient.
For dictation, yes. On-Device Mode dictation is unlimited and free forever with no account required, which covers clinical notes, letters, and portal replies. Cloud Mode, Read Aloud, and meeting recording have their own limits on the free plan.