Here is a small disaster that happens to almost everyone who dictates. You talk through a really good paragraph, it lands in the wrong window, and by the time you have worked out where it went, you have lost both the text and the thread of what you were saying.
Or a gentler version. You dictated something useful a fortnight ago, you know roughly what was in it, and you have no idea which document it ended up in.
The short version: with Save history switched on, every dictation is written to a searchable log on your own computer. Type any word you remember into the search box and the list narrows instantly. Nothing is uploaded, and you can delete any entry or the whole lot whenever you like.
A safety net, not a filing system
The main value of transcript history is not organisation. It is recovery.
Dictation types into whichever window was active when you started. Usually that is exactly what you wanted. Occasionally you had clicked somewhere else, or a notification stole focus, and your careful paragraph has gone into a search box, a chat window, or nowhere visible at all.
Without a log, that text is simply gone and you have to reconstruct it from memory, which never produces the same sentence. With a log, you open History, find it at the top, and copy it out. The whole problem shrinks from a real loss to a ten second inconvenience.
Searching it
The search box filters as you type. You do not need to remember the exact phrasing, just one distinctive word. Type "invoice" and every dictation mentioning invoices appears. Click an entry and the full text shows in the pane below, ready to copy.
This turns out to be useful well beyond recovery. People use it to find the wording they used last time for a recurring situation, to check what they actually said in a note rather than what they remember saying, and to pull together everything they dictated about a particular client.
What else you can do with an entry
The History window is not just a list. Select an entry and you can:
- Copy it straight to the clipboard.
- Translate it into another language, offline, keeping the original alongside. More on that in on-device translation.
- Read it aloud in a natural voice, which is a genuinely good way to proofread. See read-aloud voices.
- Delete it, or clear the entire history in one go.
Why local storage matters here more than anywhere
Think about what a dictation history actually contains. Not documents you chose to save. Everything you said out loud to your computer, including the drafts you abandoned, the note about a colleague you rephrased before sending, and the half-formed thought at eleven at night.
That is a uniquely revealing dataset, and it is the last thing that should live on somebody else's server. PeekoType writes it to a file on your machine and nowhere else. There is no sync, no account, no backup you did not ask for, and no privacy policy that could be revised next year to permit something you would not accept today.
If you work under UK GDPR this also keeps things simple, for the same reasons we set out in GDPR-compliant voice typing. A record held only on the data controller's own device, never transmitted, is a far shorter conversation with your DPO than one processed abroad.
When to switch it off
History is a single toggle, and there are good reasons to turn it off.
Shared or public computers, obviously. Work covered by a retention policy that says notes must not persist. Situations where you are dictating something genuinely sensitive and would rather no copy existed anywhere, even locally. Switch the toggle off and nothing is written at all, rather than written and hidden.
You can also leave it on and clear it periodically, which suits most people. The Clear all history button asks you to confirm, then removes everything.
A quiet habit that pays off
Most people ignore history until the first time it saves them, then never turn it off again. If you dictate regularly, particularly across several applications, it is the difference between trusting the software and half-watching it.
It works alongside the fully offline engine behind the rest of PeekoType, and every button in the History window is documented in the user guide.