FlowVoice — part 2 (what happens to your recording)

What it is

What happens to a dictation's audio: it is kept for every dictation rather than only the failed ones, and nothing about a dictation's own outcome can delete it. Part 1, flowvoice.md, covers the two hotkey slots, the speech engines and their costs, the floating HUD and the settings card.

Where to find it

The Saved recordings list is in the settings card — Settings → Voice Control, under the Dictation (FlowVoice) heading — and on the CLI routes listed in Part 1 of this page.

How it behaves

Your recording is kept — nothing about the dictation deletes it

Every dictation keeps its audio on your machine, not just the ones that went wrong. A transcript is what the speech engine heard, and engines drop words — so the recording, which is the only copy of what you actually said, outlives the dictation that produced it. Every dictation appears under Saved recordings with its audio, ready to re-transcribe or delete.

What a dictation's own outcome can never do is delete its audio: not a successful transcription, not an empty one, not a silent one, not a start that failed. A recording goes away only when you say so — ✕ Cancel on the pill mid-dictation, Delete or Clear all in the list, erasing your data, or signing out — or when your data-retention window passes (Settings → Data & Storage, 30 days by default). That window is the natural cleanup: it is far longer than noticing a dictation that came back short takes, and you can lengthen or shorten it whenever you like.

When transcription fails — your recording is saved

Every dictation is saved to disk while you speak (saved-recordings.ts, under userData/flowvoice-recordings/), so no failure can lose what you said:

• The connection drops mid-dictation, or the result comes back broken or empty. On release, the app transcribes the saved audio again by itself: first a fresh session of the same engine (the audio replayed at 8× real time), then the built-in offline transcriber (free, no network, English only, for the Gemini engine's audio). The recovered text is pasted where you were, like a normal dictation. A transcript from a stream that errored part-way is never pasted as if it were complete.
• Nothing could transcribe it right now (for example, you're offline and the offline model isn't available). The recording is kept. The pill says "Couldn't transcribe right now — your recording is saved. Click to try again.", and clicking it retries that recording and pastes at your cursor.
• Nothing was transcribed at all — you spoke, and both transcribers answered silence. The recording is kept, and the pill now SAYS so instead of settling back to idle in silence (until 2026-10-06 it said nothing anywhere, so "the app ignored me" and "nothing was said" looked identical). A press too short to hold a spoken word is the one ending that stays quiet: it is kept, but an accidental tap of the hotkey is not announced. Which line you read comes from how loud the capture actually was: "No speech was heard — nothing was transcribed." when the room was silent, or, when the capture carried real but very quiet audio (something like 26 dB below an ordinary dictation), "No speech was heard — your microphone was very quiet. Check the input device." Neither carries a click-to-retry, because re-transcribing the same audio would fail the same way.
• Saved recordings list. Settings → Voice Control → Dictation (FlowVoice) → History shows a Saved recordings group: by default only the recordings that need a look — failed, possibly incomplete, or recovered — each with Transcribe again (the text goes into history and is copied to your clipboard) and Delete. Every other dictation's audio is kept too, behind a Show all recordings toggle, so the list is not one row per dictation.
• Quitting or crashing mid-dictation no longer throws the recording away: it appears in that list on the next start. Pressing ✕ Cancel still discards it.
• The paste itself fails after a good transcript: the pill says the text is on your clipboard and in your history.
• A window pops up while you dictate into Omniscio (Windows: a console window flashing up, for example): it never receives your words. Omniscio tells it apart from an app you switched to yourself by when its program started - after your dictation began means it appeared on its own - takes the focus back and pastes into Omniscio. If it cannot get the focus back, the pill says the text is on your clipboard. An app you deliberately switched to still gets the dictation at its cursor, unsent.
• The offline transcriber narrates silence ("[BLANK_AUDIO]", "(music)"): those markers are stripped before anything is delivered, so a silent recording comes back as silence rather than as that text in your message box.
• Privacy: a dictation's audio is kept on your machine until your data-retention window passes (Settings → Data & Storage, 30 days by default) — that window is the only automatic cleanup, and it is one you control. A dictation's own outcome never deletes it; nor does anything else, except the deletions you ask for: delete it, clear all, erase your data, or sign out.

Related

• flowvoice.md — Part 1: the two hotkey slots, the speech engines and what they cost, the HUD, history and the settings card
• cost-control.md — where FlowVoice's metered costs are surfaced