The documents
What the product does with data
OpenWhispr records audio when a user presses a hotkey, turns it into text, and puts that text at their cursor. Where the audio goes depends entirely on the speech-to-text mode:
On OpenWhispr Cloud we store the transcript text and technical metadata. We
do not store audio — it’s processed in the request and discarded. Where your
voice and text go has the detail, including
the fact that custom-dictionary terms travel with cloud requests.
Managed Enterprise Bedrock and Azure OpenAI apply to AI text features such as
cleanup, agent, note chat, formatting, and translation. Those prompts go
directly from the device to the customer’s cloud account. Audio still follows
the speech-to-text mode selected for dictation, note recording, or upload.
Data residency: the United States, for us and our sub-processors. Transfers
out of the EEA, UK and Switzerland run on adequacy where it exists and the
Standard Contractual Clauses otherwise.
AI training: OpenWhispr does not use customer content for training, and
providers contracted by OpenWhispr are held to the same restriction under
Section 3 of the DPA. Customer-owned BYOK and
Enterprise cloud accounts are governed by the customer’s provider agreement and
account configuration.
Network
- Outbound only, TLS on 443. Everything else it runs binds to your own machine by design.
- System proxies and PAC scripts are honoured, on all three platforms.
- Allowlist by hostname, not IP — provider addresses change without notice.
- The full host list, split by what’s required and what’s optional, is in network allowlist. That’s the page to hand a firewall administrator.
Endpoint security
- Managed enterprise credentials are short-lived and remain in the desktop main process. AWS credentials last up to 15 minutes; Microsoft sets the Azure token expiry. They are cleared when the employee signs out or changes workspace.
- Manually entered API keys are encrypted through the OS keychain — Keychain, DPAPI, libsecret — and never sent to us.
- On Linux with no keyring available, Electron falls back to plaintext. Make sure a keyring is installed and unlocked on managed Linux fleets. How OpenWhispr is secured explains the constraint.
- Local history is an ordinary SQLite file in the user’s application-data folder, protected by the OS account and full-disk encryption rather than by a second layer of our own.
- The app auto-updates from GitHub release artifacts.
Retention
Retention is set per device, and users can reach it under Settings → Privacy & Data under System. Defaults: audio deleted after 30 days, transcripts kept until deleted, history on, cloud backup off. If your policy is “nothing on disk”, the setting to turn off is Data Retention — text is still pasted, nothing is saved. See what OpenWhispr stores, and for how long.Central administration
Active Enterprise workspace owners can configure these controls in the OpenWhispr admin portal. Business and Pro workspaces keep ordinary sign-in and manual provider setup.- SAML or OIDC company sign-in and verified-domain SSO enforcement
- SCIM 2.0 user lifecycle and group-to-team provisioning
- centrally managed Amazon Bedrock or Azure OpenAI access with no employee keys
- provider allowlists, retention, sharing, cloud backup, and minimum app version
Compliance posture
Stated precisely, because reviewers check:- SOC 2 Type 2 — audit complete, observation period passed, final report available under NDA once issued.
- HIPAA and GDPR — attestations held (2026, through our compliance platform). A BAA (available on the Business plan and above) is required before any PHI goes through the cloud service; see HIPAA and healthcare use.
- ISO 27001:2022 — programme aligned, all 93 Annex A controls implemented, certification audit not yet undertaken.