If you work in therapy or clinical practice, you already know the not-so-secret thing about the job. The work doesn't end when the client leaves the room. It ends about forty minutes later, after you've written up the session notes, updated the records, drafted the referral letter, and replied to the email from the GP. By the time you've finished, your next client is already in reception with a cup of water.
So when voice typing started getting genuinely good a couple of years ago, a lot of clinicians and therapists felt the same thing. Relief. Speak instead of type. Get through the admin twice as fast. Save the wrists. Get home in time for dinner.
There was just one small problem. Almost every popular voice typing app available was quietly sending the audio to a server in California for processing. Which is fine when you're dictating a shopping list. It is a different question entirely when the audio contains a patient's diagnosis, a client's trauma history, or a mental health risk assessment.
This post is about a way around that. It is about how on-device voice typing works, why it matters for therapeutic and clinical work specifically, and how to slot it into the way you already write up your notes. If you are looking for private dictation software in the UK, GDPR-compliant voice typing for therapists, or just a faster way to do your clinical write-ups without involving a third party, this is the long answer.
The short version: PeekoType is a Windows voice typing application that runs entirely on your own computer. Your microphone audio never leaves your machine. No cloud account, no telemetry, no international data transfers. Just dictation, the way it used to be, with a modern AI accuracy on top.
Why cloud dictation feels awkward in clinical work
Most of the popular voice-to-text apps work by recording your microphone audio and uploading it to their servers, where a much bigger transcription model does the heavy lifting. The text comes back, gets typed into your active window, and the loop closes.
It is quick. It is accurate. It is also, depending on what you do for a living, the sort of thing that makes a Caldicott Guardian raise an eyebrow.
For NHS clinicians, the issue is the Data Security and Protection Toolkit. The DSPT specifically expects you to think carefully about cloud-based processing of patient identifiable information, particularly where the data leaves the UK. For private healthcare practitioners and therapists, the issue is your professional regulator. The BACP, UKCP, BPC, BPS, HCPC, NMC and GMC all have their own variations of the same rule: client and patient information needs to be handled in a way that respects confidentiality and complies with the UK GDPR.
Cloud dictation services can and do meet those requirements through the usual combination of Data Processing Agreements, sub-processor lists, and transfer mechanisms such as the UK-US Data Bridge. None of that is a small effort, and most of the well-known providers genuinely do it properly.
But "compliant on paper" and "the kind of thing you would happily explain in a complaint" are not the same standard. If a client ever asked you whether the audio of their session notes had been transmitted to a US technology company for processing, you would want to be able to answer that question honestly. With cloud voice typing, the honest answer is yes. With on-device voice typing, the honest answer is no, and your client gets to be a person rather than an entry in someone else's data centre.
The simple alternative: dictation that stays on your computer
PeekoType is a voice typing application that runs entirely on your Windows PC. There is no cloud component. No account. No server doing the transcription. When you press F9, your microphone audio goes to a copy of OpenAI's Whisper model installed on your own machine, the text gets generated locally on your CPU, and that is the end of the data flow.
If you have used cloud dictation tools before, the experience is essentially identical. Click into Word, or your patient records system, or your secure messaging client, or your letter template. Press F9. Speak. The text appears where your cursor is. Press F9 again to stop.
The difference is structural. The audio never travels anywhere it shouldn't, because it never travels anywhere at all.
A few things this changes in practical terms:
- You don't need a Data Processing Agreement with us. We don't process your patient or client data, because nothing reaches us. You remain the controller of the data, on your own computer, exactly as if you had typed it.
- There is no sub-processor chain to vet. Some clinical IT procurement processes will ask you to list every third party that touches identifiable data. With on-device transcription, that list is empty.
- It works without internet. If your practice is in a rural area with patchy WiFi, or your clinic's firewall blocks cloud transcription services, PeekoType doesn't care. It runs the same whether you are online or off.
- No metadata trail. Cloud dictation services log when you used them, for how long, from which IP address. None of that exists with local processing, because there is no server keeping logs.
What this looks like across different clinical contexts
The abstract privacy story matters, but the real question for most clinicians is how the software slots into your day. Here are the specific shapes it tends to take.
Therapists and counsellors writing session notes
The most common pattern is the gap between sessions. Twenty minutes if you are lucky, fifteen if you are not. You need to capture the essence of the previous hour while it is still fresh, and you need to do it without rushing the next client.
The way most therapists end up using voice typing for this: open your notes template (in Word, in a secure cloud-based practice management tool, or in your encrypted local notes), press F9, and talk through the session out loud. Presenting issues, what came up, your formulation, any safeguarding concerns, the plan for next time. Five or six minutes of speaking gives you a full set of session notes that would have taken twenty minutes to type.
A few small habits help here:
- Speak the structure as you go. Say "presenting issues colon" or "intervention used colon" and Whisper handles the voice commands for punctuation cleanly.
- Don't try to write a polished prose note in one pass. Speak it conversationally, then tidy it up afterwards with a quick read-through. Voice typing rewards the dictate-first, edit-second approach.
- If a client name comes up, dictate it normally. Because the audio isn't going anywhere, there is no reason to redact yourself in real time.
GPs and consultants doing consultation write-ups
Single-handed practitioners and out-of-hours GPs in particular tend to feel the admin squeeze hardest. The clinical workflow varies wildly depending on your system (EMIS, SystmOne, Vision, or one of the private practice management platforms), but the common denominator is always the same. A free-text box you have to fill in for each consultation.
Voice typing slots into that without disrupting the system itself. Your consultation notes still go into the same fields in the same software. The only thing that changes is how the text gets there. There is no integration to install, no API to configure, and nothing for IT to approve, because PeekoType is just another input method on your keyboard.
For dictation of referral letters, the same applies. Most referral templates live in Word or Outlook. Voice typing into them works exactly like typing.
Mental health workers, social workers, OTs, physios and SLTs
Across the allied health professions, the write-up problem looks pretty similar. Lots of structured notes, lots of forms, lots of assessment reports, lots of letters. The specifics differ enormously (a physio's SOAP notes are nothing like a social worker's case file), but the privacy concerns and the time pressure are identical.
A specific note for community-based clinicians: voice typing on a laptop between visits can be a huge time saver, especially on a long drive between appointments. Because PeekoType doesn't need a connection, you can dictate notes in the car park, on the train, or in a quiet kitchen at the end of a home visit, without worrying about whether the mobile signal will hold up.
Private practice clinicians
If you are running your own practice, whether that is psychotherapy, physiotherapy, osteopathy, chiropractic, nutrition, or anything else, the additional value of on-device dictation is that you control your entire data picture. You haven't outsourced any part of your client data flow to a US technology vendor. From a marketing perspective, that is a genuine privacy claim you can make to prospective clients in your own privacy policy. It is also one fewer awkward conversation when a client asks how their notes are stored.
The bits that often trip people up
I want to be straightforward about what voice typing does and doesn't fix, because clinical software claims tend to get oversold.
It will not, on its own, make your patient records system suddenly compliant. It won't encrypt your email. It won't change your appointment system. The other links in the chain still need to be what they need to be. What it does do is make sure that the dictation step itself goes back to being clean. Your voice goes to your CPU. Your text goes into the software you would have typed into anyway. The chain does not grow.
It is also not a substitute for clinical judgement about what to write down. Voice typing makes it faster to record information; it doesn't decide what information should be recorded. The standards that govern your note-keeping (your professional body's code of ethics, the SCIE guidance, your service's own protocols) still apply in exactly the same way.
A practical setup tip that makes the biggest difference
The single biggest workflow improvement most clinicians report after switching to voice typing is the keyboard shortcut. PeekoType uses F9 by default, but if you've got a function key already mapped to something else, you can change it.
The reason this matters: voice typing is most useful when you can trigger it without thinking. Press F9, speak, press F9, done. If you are hunting through a menu every time, you will go back to typing within a week. Set the shortcut to whatever your hand naturally reaches for, and the habit forms within a few days.
The second tip: pick the model size that matches your computer. PeekoType ships with several Whisper models in different sizes. On a modern laptop bought in the last three or four years, the medium model is usually the sweet spot. Fast enough to keep up with speech, accurate enough to handle clinical terminology. If you've got a beefier desktop, the large model handles unusual drug names and proper nouns better. If you are on an older machine, the small model still does a respectable job, especially for general note-taking.
Three things worth knowing for your IG sign-off
If you are trying to get a yes from a Caldicott Guardian, an Information Governance lead, a Data Protection Officer, or a practice partner, three quick facts tend to answer most of the questions before they start:
- PeekoType doesn't store audio. It transcribes in real time and discards the audio buffer the moment the text is produced. There is no audio file sitting on your hard disk afterwards.
- PeekoType doesn't store transcripts. The text goes straight into whatever application you were already in. That application's storage and retention rules apply. PeekoType itself keeps no copy.
- PeekoType doesn't connect to the internet during normal use. No licence ping, no telemetry, no analytics, no update check that runs without your knowledge. If you want to update, you download a new installer. If you don't, nothing changes.
For most clinical IT teams, that combination is the answer to about eighty percent of the questions they were planning to ask. For the remaining twenty percent, our privacy policy covers the GDPR position in detail, and the GDPR-by-design post goes into the technical architecture.
The bottom line
If your work involves writing about people, and those notes contain anything you would not want to see on a server in another country, on-device voice typing is the calmer choice. It does the same job as cloud dictation. It just doesn't ask you to take anyone else's privacy assurances on trust.
PeekoType costs £19.99 once, comes with a 14-day free trial, and doesn't require an account. You install it, set your shortcut, and start talking. The admin hour at the end of your day gets shorter. The compliance picture gets simpler. Your wrists get a break. Your clients stay private. Your evenings start a little earlier.
If you'd like to try it, the free trial doesn't ask for a card. If you have questions about the privacy architecture before you install (the kind of questions a practice manager or DPO might ask), please drop us an email at support@peekotype.com and we'll happily talk you through it.