What leaves your PC

This page describes normal processing and component downloads on Windows. It matches What leaves your Mac point for point; where Windows differs, it says so here instead of there. The terms for voluntarily sharing data are in the privacy policy.

Processing on your PC

Recognition, translation and text processing run on your PC, without sending them to the cloud. Transcripts are kept in local history. You choose whether meeting audio is saved to disk.

Network requests

Account. Signing in, signing up, asking for a token, and changing your name or password by your own action — our own server. Signing up carries your email, your password and a signature made with the install key. Signing in with Google works the same way as on Mac: your browser opens Google’s own sign-in page, and our server — not the app itself — receives your Google account identifier, email and profile name from Google, to create your VerbaIDE account, sign you in, or connect Google to one you already have.

When you are signed in, the sign-in, each licence-token refresh (once a day, or after four hours of use) and the start of a trial also carry your Windows display language, the app version and how long the app was in use since its previous refresh; the trial start also carries a one-way fingerprint — a hash of the PC’s MachineGuid (the registry value itself is not sent), built with the same salt and format as the Mac’s hardware fingerprint. The server records the IP address, country and city the request came from, for the same reason as on Mac: one trial per machine, at most five devices per account, and a way to see when one account is used by several people. IP address and city are kept for 90 days, the rest for as long as the account exists.

Update check — the installer build reads its own version list at cdn.verbaide.com/downloads/windows/appcast.json, once a day and when you press the button in About. It shares nothing with the Mac app’s list — not the address, not the signing key, not the version number — because the two apps now version and ship independently. Each entry’s signature is verified before anything about it is trusted. A build installed from the Microsoft Store does not check at all: the Store updates it instead. Everything else is the same rule as on Mac: the app only reads the list and sends nothing about you, the daily check can be turned off with a checkbox in About, and a new version installs only after you press Install.

Translation dictionary catalogue — cdn.verbaide.com, when Settings are open or when the language screen of the first-run setup is open.

Translation dictionary files — cdn.verbaide.com, when you download one.

Speech model. On the free tier, VerbaIDE downloads an archive of NVIDIA’s original Parakeet model, built for the ONNX engine, from github.com/k2-fsa/sherpa-onnx — not from our CDN, and without asking any registry. During the trial and on paid plans, the main model is our fine-tuned build, tracked by its own registry pointer, recognition/parakeet-onnx.json, and its manifest on cdn.verbaide.com. That pointer is separate from the Mac app’s parakeet.json: the Mac one points to a Core ML build, this one to ONNX, and reading the wrong one would fetch a model in the wrong format. The registry is checked at launch, at most once a day, and only during the trial, on a paid plan, while first-run setup is open, or while our model is still installed and the app has not yet confirmed that your plan has ended. When your plan changes, the model you no longer need is removed and the other one is downloaded. The term-dictionary CTC model and the speaker-labelling model that the Mac app also downloads are not part of the Windows build yet.

The dictionary and speech-model-registry requests carry no cookies and no authorization header.

Only with your consent

Usage counters. The same list as on Mac: numbers and fixed labels, never the text itself and never the name of the app you dictated into. Two doors: by session when you are signed in, and when you are not, by a stable device id plus a signature made with the install key. If you did not allow statistics, none of this is sent.

Dictation report. The same feature as on Mac, opened with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+B instead of ⌃⌥⌘B, going to the same address under the same rule: off until you tick the separate “I want to help improve speech recognition” checkbox, and nothing leaves your PC until you press Send in that window. “Suggest a Feature…” works the same way too, and is shown only next to that same checkbox.

The free tier

Dictation and term dictionaries are free forever, with no word cap and no card. Download the speech model first; afterwards dictation works offline. The component catalogues fetched while Settings are open and the speech-registry check at launch do not depend on your plan.