Not everyone dictates on the same computer every day. Some people hot desk. Some work across a home machine and an office one. Some are contractors moving between client sites where installing software means raising a ticket and waiting a fortnight.
For all of them the usual answer is unsatisfying: install it everywhere, set it up again each time, and leave a trail of settings on machines that are not yours.
The short version: portable mode keeps PeekoType entirely inside its own folder. Put that folder on a USB stick and your dictation setup, vocabulary, snippets and history travel with you. Nothing is written to the host computer's user profile or registry, so nothing is left behind when you unplug.
What travels with you
The point of portable mode is not just the program. It is everything you have taught it.
- Your microphone, language and model preferences
- Your custom vocabulary list, which is the thing you would least like to rebuild
- Your text snippets, sign-offs and boilerplate
- Your transcript history, if you have it switched on
- Your downloaded speech models and voices
Plug the stick into a different computer and you are not setting anything up. You are carrying on.
Who this actually solves a problem for
Locked-down machines. Plenty of workplaces do not give staff install rights. Portable software sidesteps that entirely, because there is nothing to install.
Shared and hot-desk computers. If you sit somewhere different each day, portable mode means your setup follows you rather than living on one desk.
Contractors and visiting professionals. Anyone working on a client's hardware who would rather not leave software and settings behind on it.
Anyone who simply prefers it. Some people like knowing exactly where their software lives and being able to move or delete it in one action.
The privacy angle
Portable mode extends the same principle the whole app is built on. PeekoType already keeps your audio on your own machine rather than sending it to a server, which we explain in how offline speech recognition works. Portable mode narrows that further: not just your device, but one folder on it that you control absolutely.
For anyone dictating confidential material on a machine they do not own, that distinction is worth having. When you unplug the stick, the working data goes with you.
Being straight about the trade-off
Portable mode does exactly what it promises, and that has one honest consequence worth stating plainly.
A normal installation keeps a couple of backup copies of licence and trial state elsewhere on the computer, so deleting one file cannot reset things. Portable mode cannot do that, because writing anything outside its own folder is precisely what it is designed not to do. There is nowhere else to put a backup without breaking the promise.
That is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight, and it is the sort of trade-off worth knowing about rather than discovering. In exchange for genuinely leaving no trace, the protections are slightly lighter.
Switching it on
Portable mode is off by default. You turn it on by placing a small marker file next to the program, and off again by deleting it. There is no separate download and no different version to buy: the same PeekoType behaves either way depending on whether that file is there.
A portable licence can be activated on up to three machines, which fits how portable software is actually used. The licence file lives on the stick and records the computers it has been used on.
The user guide covers the practical steps, and our guide to older PCs is worth a look if the machines you plug into are not the newest.