What happens to the audio you record

Agents: claude, codex, opencode · On: phone, desktop · optional

Every dictation goes to the VCode machine to be transcribed. The clip is not saved anywhere and the transcript is never written to a log. With Live text the audio leaves the phone once, when you stop, so the machine can fix the words.

Why you would use it

You are about to dictate something you would not paste into a third-party web form. This is the path the audio takes, and the checks in the code that keep it short.

How to use it

Nothing to do. This describes what already happens. There is no setting that keeps the audio on the phone: the machine transcribes both the waveform and the live text dictations.

What you see

Nothing extra in the UI. What you can check:

• journalctl --user -u v-code shows transcribed 48213b clip.webm → 112 chars — sizes only, never the clip and never the words.
• journalctl --user -u v-code-voice shows transcribe audio=7.4s took=0.62s status=200 — the same shape, no text.

Limits and known gaps

• Anything that can log in to VCode can record and transcribe as you. Login is full trust; see trust-model-and-security-headers.
• The sidecar has no auth and no TLS. It stays on loopback, and anything running as this user on that machine can post a clip to it.
• If you point VCODE_STT_URL at someone else's service, none of this applies to what that service does. What VCode does not do is store or log the clip on the way there.
• Live text caches its model files in Cache Storage on the phone (portal-live-engine). That is the model, not your audio. An app update leaves them there, and removes the transformers-cache the retired in-browser Whisper engine left.

Related

• choose-the-dictation-engine — waveform or live text
• dictate-live — live text, and the correction that sends its audio to this machine
• install-the-voice-sidecar — the service that does the transcribing
• point-dictation-at-another-service — sending clips somewhere else
• dictate-a-message — the recording this describes
• trust-model-and-security-headers — what logging in is worth
• logs-and-troubleshooting — the journal lines quoted above