Private Transcription Mode: What It Does and Skips
Author: Hushscript Published: Last reviewed:
Most of what Hushscript does is built to leave as little of your audio behind as possible: extract the audio in your browser, delete it the moment the transcript is ready, encrypt whatever text remains. Private mode takes that a step further and skips the “text remains” part entirely.
What private mode actually does
Turn it on before you start a job and set an archive password first. That password lives only in your browser: Hushscript never receives it, never stores it, and cannot recover it if you lose it. From there, the job runs speech recognition only: nothing is written to your account and no post-processing runs on the result. What comes back is a short-lived encrypted result that your browser immediately packages into a password-protected .husharchive, built on your device using the password you set.
Everything else about the job stays normal. Saved dictionaries, prompt presets, one-off keyterms, speaker detection, multichannel audio, merged uploads: all of it still applies in private mode, at the same per-minute rate as any other job. You’re choosing a different outcome for the result, not switching to a stripped-down product.
What you give up
Private mode keeps no saved transcript, so post-processing Insights are unavailable. It returns a password-protected .husharchive instead.
Private mode vs. normal mode
Private mode keeps no saved transcript, so post-processing Insights are unavailable. It returns a password-protected .husharchive instead.
Private mode earns its place for the file that shouldn’t join that library at all: a single sensitive call, a source interview, a one-off recording where the safest number of copies is the smallest possible number. Reach for it deliberately, for the specific job that needs it, rather than as a default setting for everything you upload.
A worked example
A journalist records a 40-minute phone call with a source who agreed to background only, not direct quotes. Uploading it normally would leave a transcript sitting in the account indefinitely, encrypted but present, reachable by any future request for it. Instead, before uploading, they turn on private mode and set an archive password only they know. The call transcribes as speech-recognition-only, and what comes back is a password-protected .husharchive: no copy in the dashboard, nothing for a later request to find because there’s nothing there to find. They open the archive locally when they need to check a quote against their notes, and it stays on their own drive from that point on. If they later want a summary of the call, that’s the trade they already made. Private mode doesn’t produce one, because there’s no saved transcript left to summarize.
Setting it up
Private mode draws from the same balance as any other transcription, at the same rate; it isn’t a paid upgrade. New accounts get 30 free minutes unlocked by card verification (temporary $1 hold, released immediately, never charged), then pay as you go, and those same minutes cover private jobs exactly like normal ones. The full detail on the encryption and deletion architecture underneath both modes (browser-side extraction, deletion on completion, EU/US data residency) is on the private transcription page; the audio to text page covers the everyday, normal-mode version of the same upload flow.
Private mode is the deliberate version of a habit Hushscript follows on every job by default. For how little survives even outside private mode, see why we delete your audio after every transcription.
Independent sources and standards
Hushscript consulted these independent, non-competing references. They explain research, standards, or platform behavior and do not endorse Hushscript.
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