# What stays on your PC

Your voice and your words never leave the machine. Two other things do, and both are named here.

Speech recognition and AI cleanup both run on your PC. No audio and no transcript is uploaded.
There is no cloud speech provider in Blabb at all — not as a fallback, not for long dictations, not
for the harder ones.

The models ship inside the app, so there is nothing to fetch on first run either.

## What that means in practice

| Thing | Where it happens |
| --- | --- |
| Your voice | Captured, processed and discarded on your PC |
| The raw transcription | Produced on your PC by a model on your PC |
| AI cleanup | Runs on your PC, on your graphics card or your processor |
| Your dictation history | A file on your PC, encrypted |

Blabb's own About page states two of these plainly: **"Works on this PC — your voice and text stay
on this PC"** and **"No tracking — Blabb does not collect usage data"**.

Because none of it depends on a server, dictation keeps working with the network unplugged. See
[Working offline](/docs/account/working-offline/).

## The two things that do leave

Saying "nothing leaves your PC" would be easier and it would not be true. Two things go out, and
neither carries anything you dictated.

### 1. The licence check

Blabb checks your subscription with the licence server. That request carries your licence key, the
identifier of our Polar organisation and, once the machine has been activated, the activation id
for this device. The first activation also sends a label so you can tell your devices apart in the
Polar portal, and that label contains your computer's name. No audio, no transcript, no dictated
text — none of that is ever part of it.

It happens once per session, and at most once a day after that for a machine left running. While it
cannot get an answer at all — offline, or the network is refusing — it tries again every five
minutes until it does. An already-verified subscription keeps working offline for 30 days, so a
flight or a locked-down network does not stop you dictating.

### 2. Crash reports

Off by default. Nothing is sent unless you turn the switch on in Settings → **Privacy**.

A crash report contains no voice and no dictated text. Before anything is sent, sensitive strings —
file paths, email addresses and identifiers — are scrubbed out of it. See
[Crash reports](/docs/privacy/crash-reports/).

## What Blabb is not

Blabb is **not** described as HIPAA compliant, and there is no Business Associate Agreement on
offer. Nobody can honestly certify your compliance from the outside, and a vendor claiming
otherwise is selling you a document rather than a property.

What we can tell you is what the software does: your voice and your words stay on your machine, the
history file is encrypted, and protected health information is masked in the logs automatically.
Whether that satisfies your obligations is a judgement for you and your compliance people to make,
and the facts on this page are there so you can make it.

## Next

- [Where your data is kept](/docs/privacy/where-your-data-lives/) — every file and what is in it
- [Deleting your data](/docs/privacy/deleting-your-data/)
- [Privacy policy](/legal/privacy-policy/)