Does it work without internet?

Does Perfect Dictation work without internet?

The short answer

Writing needs a connection, because the speech engine runs online. If you are offline, your clip is kept on your PC and sends itself the moment you are back.

Why it needs a connection

Turning speech into clean, punctuated text well takes large speech and language models, far larger than would run comfortably on a normal PC. Running them online is what lets Perfect Dictation write as well on a five-year-old laptop as on a new workstation, without slowing your PC down or filling your disk.

How much data it uses

Very little. Each dictation is sent once, as a small compressed clip, when you let go of the key. A minute of talking is typically a few hundred kilobytes, less than loading one web page. A phone hotspot or hotel Wi-Fi is plenty.

What happens offline

You dictate as usual.
Your clip is kept safely on your PC, in the queue of waiting dictations.
The moment your connection is back, it sends itself and the text appears in History, ready to copy.

Nothing you say is lost to a dropped connection, a train tunnel or a flaky café network.

When the service itself is busy

Perfect Dictation uses more than one speech and clean-up engine. If the main one is slow or busy, the next one takes over by itself, usually without you noticing more than a second or two. The status page shows how everything is running.

Is the audio stored while it waits?

A waiting clip is stored only on your own PC, and only until it has been sent. Once your text is written, the audio is gone: we never keep it on our servers. See Do you keep my audio?

Slow connections

On a slow connection, such as a busy train or a weak mobile signal, dictation still works; the text simply takes a little longer to come back, because the clip takes longer to send. Short dictations are least affected.

Firewalls and company networks

Perfect Dictation talks only to its own service over the normal secure web connection (HTTPS, port 443), the same way a browser does. On most company networks it works with no changes. If your network blocks it, your IT team can allow perfectdictation.com and api.perfectdictation.com.

VPNs

Dictation works through a VPN. If text is noticeably slower with the VPN on, the VPN's route is usually the cause; try a server closer to you.