On-device doesn't mean nothing is kept

Last updated 11 September 2026

Why a history exists at all

Dictation goes wrong in a specific and frustrating way: you speak two hundred words, something mangles the middle, and you cannot remember exactly what you said. Without a history the only recovery is to reconstruct it from memory, which is slower than having typed it.

With one — particularly one that keeps the audio — you play it back and find that you said something slightly different from what you remember. That is a genuinely valuable feature and it is why almost every dictation app has one.

• Recovering a paragraph that landed in the wrong window.
• Finding out whether a misrecognition was the app or you.
• Retrieving a dictation you sent before realising it was wrong.
• Working out which words to add to your vocabulary, by seeing what recurs.

What is actually stored

In Vaitly Voice all of it is under the app's own directory in ~/Library/Application Support/ on your Mac. It is not synced, not backed up by us, and never transmitted.

The honest exposure

Think about what a year of dictation history actually contains for you. For most people it is the highest-density collection of their own written communication in one place: correspondence, notes, half-finished thoughts, things said about colleagues, a password spoken aloud once by accident.

That sitting on an encrypted personal machine is a reasonable trade for the ability to recover a lost dictation. The same thing on a shared family computer, an unencrypted laptop, or a machine that crosses borders is a different proposition.

Choosing a retention period

1. Start with who else uses the Mac A machine only you log into is a different risk from a shared household computer. This matters more than the number of days.
2. Ask what you dictate General work correspondence is one thing. Privileged legal material, patient notes, unannounced commercial information and journalism sources are another.
3. Ask how often you actually use it Most people recover a dictation within minutes of it going wrong, or never. A long window is rarely what makes the feature useful.
4. Pick the shortest period that covers the realistic case For most people that is days rather than months. Then check it is what the setting actually says — defaults are chosen for the average user, not for you.
5. Turn on FileVault This protects the history whatever period you chose, and it is free. If you do only one thing on this page, do this one.

The argument for keeping it

A page that only argued for deletion would be unbalanced. There are good reasons to keep a longer history:

• Professional record. In some regulated roles, a record of what you dictated and when is protective rather than risky.
• Building your vocabulary. Seeing which words recur wrongly is how you know what to teach it.
• Recovering work. The obvious one, and the reason the feature exists.
• Understanding your own patterns. Some people find the record of what they dictate genuinely useful for how they organise their day.

Deleting it

In Vaitly Voice, history is deleted from Settings, and setting a shorter retention period removes anything older than the new window. It is a local file operation — nothing is being requested from a server, because there is nothing on one.

A point worth making plainly: with a local history, deletion actually deletes. With a cloud service, deleting from the interface removes it from your view and the vendor's backups are a separate question with a separate timeline. That difference is one of the quieter advantages of the architecture.