Transcription that cannot betray a source

You promised someone their name would not go any further. Then you uploaded the interview to a company neither of you has heard of.

This is the quiet gap in a lot of otherwise careful reporting practice. Journalists think hard about encrypted messaging, burner numbers, and what goes in a Slack channel. Then the interview gets transcribed by whichever service is fastest, because transcription is tedious and the deadline is real.

The same gap exists in workplace investigations. An HR investigator will be scrupulous about who sits in the room and how the file is stored, and then run the recording through a consumer transcription app because the alternative is typing it out at nine in the evening.

What a transcription vendor ends up holding

When you upload an interview, the service receives the complete audio — the source's voice, their name if it was said aloud, the identifying details they gave to establish that they were in a position to know, and the parts they asked you to keep off the record. Then it receives a text version of all of it, which is far easier to search than audio.

Depending on the vendor, some combination of those artefacts may be retained for a defined window, retained indefinitely, kept in request logs carved out of the retention promise, or used to improve the service. All of it sits under a jurisdiction you did not choose and is reachable by whatever legal process applies there.

None of this requires the vendor to behave badly. It only requires them to receive a lawful demand, or to be breached, or to be acquired by someone with different priorities.

The only guarantee that survives a subpoena

You cannot be compelled to produce a record that was never created, and a company cannot hand over logs it never received.

Walkie's On-Device Mode runs the speech model on your own machine and makes no network request at all. The audio is transcribed locally; the text lands in your notes; nothing is transmitted. There is no vendor in the chain, so there is nobody to serve, nothing to preserve, and no account to be disclosed. It works with the wifi off, and it works with no account — which, if you would rather not have a subscription associated with your reporting, is the relevant detail.

It is unlimited and free forever on every plan. The privacy option is not the one behind a paywall.

What this looks like in practice

For reporters

• Dictate the write-up immediately. On-Device Mode, straight after the interview, while you still remember what they did not say.
• Background briefings — the conversations most sensitive to source identification are exactly the ones worth keeping entirely local.
• Draft aloud. The structure you speak is usually better than the structure you type, and the draft never leaves the laptop.
• Field notes offline. Airplane mode, no connection, no difference in behaviour.

For workplace investigators

• Interview summaries the same day, in the neutral language the file will need if it is ever read by someone else.
• Grievance and case records kept current without a second evening of typing.
• Complainant accounts — the category where a confidentiality promise is most load-bearing and most often relied on.

If you record, know what recording means

Walkie can record and transcribe a call, and on a Mac with Apple Intelligence it can summarise entirely on-device. But recordings and transcripts are stored in your account until you delete them — a searchable archive is a stored archive. Deletion is permanent and takes the rows, the audio, and the cloud copy with it, so export first if you are not certain.

What Walkie is not

It is not an anonymity tool, a secure messenger, or a threat model in a box. It does not hide that you are running it, protect a compromised machine, or help with anything outside the narrow question of whether your transcription creates a copy elsewhere. If your machine is the thing at risk, on-device transcription is not the control you need.

Within that narrow question, though, the answer is unusually clean: in On-Device Mode there is no request, so there is no copy, so there is nothing for anyone to ask for.

Questions