Private voice journaling with the cloud provider you already trust

Already paying for OpenAI, Google, or another cloud provider for personal work? Bring that relationship to your journal: better summaries, deeper pattern detection, your key, transcripts still local.

When a cloud provider is the right call

On-device is the right default if you don't trust any provider with journal audio. But if you already trust a specific provider for personal work, routing your journal through them keeps that trust and unlocks the richer self-reflection bigger cloud models can do.

In practice that means longer-form summaries, pattern detection across entries over weeks or months, and prompts that actually engage with what you've been writing. On-device models can't quite match that yet, and pretending otherwise would be marketing copy.

The boundary: we route your audio to the provider you pick, under your account. We don't see the audio, the transcript, or your key past the current session. Transcripts live in local DuckDB on your device, same as the on-device path, same as every other configuration.

How it works

  1. Pick the provider you already trust: OpenAI, Groq, Deepgram, HuggingFace, Ollama, X.AI, Google, Mistral, or DeepSeek.
  2. Paste your personal API key in onboarding. We route to your account, not a shared pool.
  3. Record the journal entry the way you normally would.
  4. We send the audio to your provider for transcription, and optionally for a summary or reflective prompt.
  5. The transcript and any AI output write to local DuckDB on your device. Nothing lands on our servers.

How it compares

FeatureGeneric transcription appsOn-device transcriptionjotty.pro with your personal cloud key
Who sees the journal textThe app vendor and any integrated partnersOnly your deviceOnly your chosen provider, under your account
Who holds the keyVendor manages credentialsNo external key neededYou hold and supply your own API key
Model quality vs privacyVendor controls bothOn-device quality; strongest postureCloud model quality; provider trust is your call
Where the journal lives long-termVendor account or cloud storageLocal DuckDB on the deviceLocal DuckDB on the device; not on our servers

Honest answers

Why send a personal journal to any provider?

Because you might already be doing it. If you use OpenAI or Google for personal work and have read the terms, routing your journal through them doesn't introduce a new vendor; it extends the relationship you already have. If you don't trust any cloud provider with audio of yourself thinking out loud, keep it on-device.

Can I rotate or revoke my key later?

Yes. The key is yours. Rotate or revoke it any time through your provider's dashboard. We don't store or cache it beyond the current session. Once you revoke, new audio stops routing until you supply a fresh key.

Will the provider use my entries to train models?

We can't answer that for you. It depends entirely on the provider's data-usage policy and which tier you're on. Check their terms directly, especially the sections on API data usage and training opt-outs. Some providers offer zero-data-retention tiers or explicit opt-outs for API traffic. The provider is the only authoritative source on this; we don't have visibility into how they handle data once it leaves our routing layer.


If the trust calculus tips the other way and you'd rather no audio ever leave the device, keep journaling on-device - same workflow with on-device transcription instead.

Handling highly sensitive content?

Use the Local version of this workflow.