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If a dictation produced nothing, errored, or you cancelled it by accident, the audio is often still on your machine — you can transcribe it again without saying it all over.

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Re-transcribe from history

1

Open your history

Your recent dictations are listed in the control panel.
2

Find the one that failed

Failed items are marked, and a transcription that returned nothing appears as an empty entry rather than disappearing.
3

Choose Re-transcribe

The item’s actions include Re-transcribe. It runs the saved audio through transcription again.
If the failure was caused by something you’ve since fixed — a missing model, a provider that wasn’t set up, an expired session, no network — re-transcribing is all you need.
If you see “Audio file not found or expired”, the recording is past its retention period or was removed, and it can’t be recovered.

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What’s kept, and for how long

These are the defaults on a new install. All of them are in Settings → Privacy & Data under System. Re-transcribing needs the audio, so it works for the last 30 days by default. You can raise or lower that, or turn audio storage off entirely, in the same place.

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Recovering a dictation you cancelled

By default, pressing Escape during a dictation discards it and the audio is not kept — so a cancelled take is gone. You can change that for next time. Switch on Save discarded dictations in Settings → Privacy & Data under System. Cancelled dictations then stay in your history and can be re-transcribed like any other. It needs both Data Retention and Audio Retention to be on — the toggle stays disabled otherwise, because there’d be nowhere to keep the audio.

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FAQ

On your own machine. The same section shows Storage Usage — how many files and how much space — and Clear All Audio if you want them gone now.
With Data Retention off, transcriptions are pasted but never saved, so there’s nothing to recover. The app says as much in the history view: “Data retention is off. Transcriptions and audio are not saved to history.”
If it runs through OpenWhispr Cloud, yes — it’s a new transcription. Running it on a local model doesn’t touch your allowance. See Plans and limits.
Yes. Each history item offers View raw transcript and Copy raw transcript, which give you the transcription before any cleanup was applied.