Privacy & security

Speech recognition runs on your Mac

Spokn’s speech models are installed with the app and run on your Mac’s own processor. Audio is turned into text on the computer and is never uploaded, streamed or shared. Dictation works with the internet switched off.

What Spokn keeps, and where

Spokn keeps its settings, your saved words and macros, the scratch pad and, if you leave it on, a history of recent sentences in its folder on your Mac, readable only by your user account. You can turn history off in Settings → Library; Spokn then deletes what it saved and keeps nothing new. Spokn does not keep audio recordings.

When Spokn goes online

Only for your licence. When you activate, and about once a month after that, Spokn contacts spoknlabs.com and sends your licence key, an anonymous code for this Mac, the Mac’s name and Spokn’s version number. The code is a scrambled form of the Mac’s hardware number; it cannot be turned back into it. We use these details to keep each licence to two Macs and nothing else.

If Spokn cannot reach us, it keeps working for up to 60 days after its last check-in. Spokn has no tracking, advertising or crash reporting built in.

For your IT team

• Network: allow HTTPS to spoknlabs.com for activation, and to downloads.spoknlabs.com for the download. Nothing else is needed.
• Networks that block it: Spokn shows a code for the Mac; send it to us and we will send back an activation to paste in.
• Permissions: Microphone (to hear you), Accessibility (to type into the report) and Input Monitoring (for the shortcut).
• Spokn types text the same way a keyboard does. It does not read your reporting system’s data.

Your responsibility as the clinician

Spokn is a dictation tool. It is not a medical device and does not make clinical decisions. Speech recognition can mishear words, including laterality, negation and numbers. Always read the report before you sign it.

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