How VaakApp works

Does VaakApp upload my voice or my transcripts?

No. Speech recognition runs on your own CPU, and your audio, your transcripts, your notes and your usage counts stay on your machine. There is no cloud transcription, no account, no telemetry and no analytics.

Three things in the app can use the network, and none of them carries audio or text. Downloading an extra speech model happens only when you click Download. Checking for a new version fetches one small public file naming the latest release and is off by default. Activating a licence contacts the licensing service with your licence key, a device label and an activation id.

That is the whole list. The app's own window cannot reach the network at all — its content policy permits no external address — which is why those three live in the program itself rather than in the interface.

Does VaakApp work with no internet connection?

Yes, completely and permanently. The English speech model is compiled into the application, so there is nothing to fetch on first run and nothing to fetch later. Install it on a machine that has never been online and dictation works.

Why is there a model download at all if the app is offline?

Because the built-in model is a choice, not a limit. One larger model is offered in Settings so you can swap it if you want to, and the download only ever happens when you click it. It shows progress, and the file is checked against a known fingerprint before VaakApp will use it.

If you never open that list, VaakApp never makes the request. The offer exists because pinning everyone to one model forever is a worse deal than letting people change it.

Is my dictation history saved to my disk?

Yes — Save to disk is on by default, so your recent transcriptions are kept as plain text in your own user folder. They are never uploaded, but anything that can read your files can read them, which is worth a thought on a shared login or a machine without disk encryption.

Three ways back out, and each does what it says. The ✕ on a row removes that one entry. Clear all empties the list and the file. Turning Save to disk off deletes the file outright.

How many entries are kept is yours to set, between 5 and 200. The default is 25.

Does VaakApp keep the audio of what I said?

Not unless you turn it on. Saving the audio is off by default. With it on, each dictation also keeps a .wav file beside its text, which you can download or delete on its own.

The default is off because a recording is a more sensitive thing than its transcript: it carries your voice, it is not something you can skim to check, and it accumulates. Turning it off later deletes nothing you already recorded, and turning it on is not retroactive.

Nothing is ever deleted automatically, on a timer or on a size limit. Clips go when you delete them.

Where does VaakApp keep my files?

All of them in one folder in your own user profile — on Windows that is %LOCALAPPDATA%\in.a10i.vaakapp. Settings → Data & storage has an Open data folder button that takes you straight there.

What is in it: settings.json holds your preferences and no transcribed text. history.json holds your recent transcriptions as plain text, while Save to disk is on. stats.json holds counts only — words, sessions, seconds — and never a transcript. notes holds your VaakPad notes, one plain Markdown file each. models holds any model you downloaded. recordings holds saved audio, if you switched that on.

Your VaakPad notes folder can be moved anywhere you like — Documents, an Obsidian vault, a synced folder — in Settings → Data & storage.

One thing lives outside that folder: the date your trial began, kept in Windows Credential Manager so that it survives a settings wipe. It holds no personal data.

How do I remove everything VaakApp has stored?

Uninstall VaakApp, then delete the folder %LOCALAPPDATA%\in.a10i.vaakapp. That folder is everything: settings, history, stats, notes, downloaded models and saved audio. If you moved your notes folder elsewhere, delete that too.

You can also do it piecemeal from inside the app while you keep using it: Clear all in History, Reset in Your Voice, and Delete note in VaakPad.

What is in the diagnostic file, and what is deliberately not?

It holds seven facts about the build and a log of what the app did: your VaakApp version, which commit it was built from, your operating system version, your typing method, your dictation mode, which speech model is running, and your licence status. It holds nothing you dictated.

What is kept out is kept out at the moment of writing rather than by everyone remembering to be careful: no transcript text, no note titles, no file paths, no application names, no computer name, no microphone name, and no part of a licence key. A line that would have carried any of those is replaced by a note saying what kind of thing was withheld.

VaakApp never sends it. About → Report a problem saves it as a file or copies a short summary, and you decide whether to send it. Open it in Notepad first if you would like to — being able to is the reason it works this way.

Does dictating put my words on the system clipboard?

In the default typing method, yes, for about half a second. Your text goes on the clipboard, VaakApp sends the paste keystroke, and then it puts your previous clipboard contents back.

Both of those writes are marked with the flags Windows provides, so a dictation does not appear under Win+V and is never sent to Microsoft's cloud clipboard, even if you have those Windows features switched on. Other clipboard managers are asked by the same convention rather than forced — Windows does not enforce it, so we will not claim more than that.

In Live mode each phrase is pasted as you say it and your clipboard is restored once at the end, so it holds dictated text for the whole session rather than half a second.

If you want no clipboard involvement at all, switch the typing method to Simulate keystrokes. It types character by character and reads nothing. It is slower on long text, which is why it is not the default.

Do I need an account to use VaakApp?

No. There is no sign-up, no login and no profile. A licence key is entered in the app when you buy one, and that is the only identifier involved.

Why does the microphone stay open when I stop talking?

Because Keep listening until I stop is the default. A pause does not end a recording — it runs until you press the shortcut again or click stop. That suits thinking out loud, where a pause only means you are deciding what to say next.

If you would rather a pause ended the recording, turn it off in Settings → Auto-stop, or in the tray menu, where the same switch is worded identically. It is one setting, so changing it in either place changes it in both.

With it off, a recording ends after a pause of your chosen length — the Silence cutoff, adjustable from 0.5 to 5.0 seconds and set to 2.0 by default.

The change applies to your next dictation, not the one already running.

The pill has a slowly pulsing outline. What does that mean?

It means the microphone is open and this particular recording has no ending of its own — you turned Keep listening on, so it will run until you stop it. The pulse stops when the recording does.

It is there because the bars cannot tell you this. They react to sound, so a one-second pause and a recording that will never close on its own look identical: five short stubs. The bars report sound; the outline reports intent.

What does “Mic open” on the pill mean?

That you have been dictating for about a minute, so VaakApp has stopped treating every pause as an ending. It now waits up to 20 seconds of quiet before closing the microphone, instead of stopping at your Silence cutoff. Pick the thought back up and the same recording carries on.

It only applies to a long dictation — a two-second recording into a chat box behaves as it always did. Turn it off with Settings → Auto-stop → Stay open through long pauses.

It does nothing while Keep listening until I stop is on, because then there is no pause cutoff for it to extend.

Switch to another application and VaakApp closes the microphone immediately rather than waiting out the 20 seconds.

What is the difference between Polished and Live?

Polished, the default, listens to the whole recording and types it once you stop — it sees the full phrase before deciding, so punctuation and capitalisation are better and there are no visible joins. Live types each phrase as you say it, so there is almost no wait, but each fragment is punctuated on its own.

They are called Flow and Instant in a few places in the app; they are the same two modes.

A change takes effect from your next recording, not the one in progress.

How long can a single dictation be?

Ten minutes in Polished mode, an hour in Live mode. If a recording reaches the cap it stops there, everything up to that point is still transcribed, and History records that it was cut short.

The two numbers differ because Polished transcribes the entire recording in one pass after you stop, so length is wait. Live cuts at natural pauses and does not care how long the session runs. Long sessions are what Live is for.

It stops listening before I have finished my sentence.

Turn on Keep listening until I stop, in Settings → Auto-stop or in the tray menu, and pauses will not end a recording at all. If you would rather keep the automatic ending, raise the Silence cutoff to 3 or 4 seconds and check that Stay open through long pauses is on.

The bars on the pill do not move when I speak.

Then nothing is reaching the app, and it is one of four things: the wrong input device is selected, the microphone is muted in Windows, Windows is refusing microphone access to desktop applications, or another program has taken the device exclusively.

Start with Settings → Microphone → Input device. “(System Default)” follows whatever Windows is set to, and that changes on its own when you plug in a headset or a dock — picking your device by name instead is the usual fix. The list refreshes when you reopen the window.

If VaakApp cannot open the microphone at all it says so: the pill shows an error and History records a row.

It keeps mishearing the same word.

Add it to the Dictionary as a heard-as → write-as rule. One rule can list several misheard variants, separated by commas, all mapping to the same spelling. Your dictionary terms also nudge the recogniser towards those words in the first place, so the fix works at both ends.

This is the right tool for names, places, acronyms and jargon — the words a general model has no reason to know.

A Dictionary rule is replacing words I did not mean.

Because a rule is a literal replacement and applies every time that word appears. A rule turning “thought” into “Claude” will also rewrite every real “thought” you dictate. Match the misheard form that is distinctive rather than a common English word.

If what you are hearing back is an ordinary word — “thought”, “first”, “about” — there is often no variant distinctive enough to be safe, and a rule will cost you more than it fixes. Two-word forms are safer than one, because they collide far less often.

“Delete that” removed more than I expected, or nothing at all.

A correction trigger deletes itself plus the clause before it, back to the previous sentence boundary or the start of the fragment. So how much disappears depends on where the last full stop fell, and it only works inside one phrase — say the correction in the same breath, before you pause.

“Meet at five, scratch that, six” becomes “Meet at six”. Pause after the mistake and the correction lands in a new fragment with nothing before it to remove.

The trigger phrases are scratch that, delete that, strike that and ignore that, and they are editable in Cleanup — add your own, or reset to the defaults.

My “um”s are disappearing even though filler removal is off.

That is the speech model, not VaakApp. Whisper often does not transcribe disfluencies in the first place, so they never reach the point where VaakApp would decide whether to remove them. With the setting off, VaakApp removes nothing.

Remove filler words is off by default, and when it is on it strips only a short list — um, umm, uh, uhh, er, erm, ah, hmm — which you can edit or clear. Clearing the list turns removal off even with the switch on.

Can I dictate in a language other than English?

Not in this release. The built-in model is English-only and the engine is pinned to English, so there is no language picker to look for. Other languages are planned.

They were built and then held back, and the decision was measured rather than guessed. Across eight speech models run on real Telugu and Hindi dictation, the ones that run comfortably on a CPU produced the wrong alphabet often enough that shipping them would have been worse than not having them.

Accents are a different question. The model handles a wide range of English accents, including Indian English, and words it consistently mishears are what the Dictionary is for.

Will downloading the larger model make it more accurate?

It improves English accuracy a little in some cases, and it does not enable other languages. If a specific word is the problem, a Dictionary rule is a better fix than a bigger model.

The transcription is generally poor.

Speak a little more slowly, reduce background noise, and check that the right microphone is selected — a laptop's built-in array picking up a room is the commonest cause. For words it gets wrong every time, use the Dictionary.

Which platforms does VaakApp run on?

Windows 10 and Windows 11, 64-bit. macOS and Linux are planned and not yet available.

Does VaakApp update itself?

No, never. About → Check for updates fetches one small public file naming the latest release and compares it with your version. Nothing about you or your installation is sent, and the app never downloads or runs an installer for you.

Check for updates on launch is off by default. With it on, the same check runs once shortly after startup and stays silent unless there is something to say.

Is VaakApp a subscription?

No. It is a one-time purchase with lifetime updates, and there is a free trial that needs no card.

How do I activate a licence?

In the app, never on this website — open the License section and paste your key. Activation contacts the licensing service with your key, a device label and an activation id, and carries no audio, no text and no usage data.