Who it's for

For therapists. What is said in the room stays in the room.

Session notes, supervision, reflective practice. The whole value of a therapeutic space is that it is contained, and a container with an upload in it is not contained. Everything here runs on the phone on the table.

Use it forThe note you dictate after a session, supervision, and recorded sessions for training or accreditation.
The argumentIf a client asks who else can hear the recording, the answer is nobody, and you can show them in the room with airplane mode.
Not forMaking recording clinically appropriate. That question is yours and your supervisor's, and the answer is often no.

When you'd use it
The risk
Why Just Transcribe
The rules
Setting up
Where it fails
Answers
Next

Two leather armchairs and a small table beside a window. — Photo: Aalo Lens / Unsplash

Five places it earns its keep

Notice that only two of these involve recording a client.

Your own notes, straight after the session

The ten minutes between clients is when the note is accurate and the fifty minutes later is when it is convenient. Speaking the note out loud immediately captures the thing you will otherwise lose: the sense of how it went, not just what was said.

This is your voice, about the session, not a recording of the client. Usually a much lower bar.

In the app: record, transcribe locally, and let the summary pull out themes and action items. Edit it into your case note, then delete the recording.

Supervision and intervision

Supervision is where you talk about clients, out loud, to somebody else. It is dense, it is useful, and almost nobody keeps a proper record of what was agreed because taking notes during it ruins it.

Speaker labels make a two or four person supervision transcript readable afterwards.

In the app: save your supervisor's voice once and transcripts come back attributed. Use folders to keep supervision separate from everything else, and full-text search to find the case discussion from three months ago.

Recorded sessions for training and accreditation

Most training routes require recorded sessions, reviewed with a supervisor, with explicit client consent. That requirement is not going away, and the recording has to exist for a while.

The question is only whether it also has to exist on a company's server, and it does not.

In the app: record and transcribe on the device, keep it in its own folder, and export only what supervision actually needs. Delete on the schedule you promised the client, on the one device it was ever on.

Intake and assessment

A first session is a great deal of history delivered at speed while you are also trying to build an alliance. Writing it down competes directly with listening.

A transcript means the history is captured without you breaking eye contact to get a date right.

In the app: use Advanced Privacy so the audio goes as soon as the text exists. A session like that keeps nothing, so export the text to your clinical records before you leave the screen, and search there later for the name or the date you half remember.

Reflective practice and your own supervision notes

The thoughts that arrive on the walk home are the ones worth keeping and the ones most reliably lost. A recorder on your wrist or in CarPlay catches them without a screen.

In the app: start from the Apple Watch, its watch face complication or the car, then transcribe later. Recording keeps running when the screen locks or you switch apps.

A session recording is the most intimate file you will ever make

A transcript of an hour of therapy contains things the client has not told their partner, their doctor or themselves. It is health data in the European sense, it is privileged or near-privileged in many jurisdictions, and it is the kind of material where the harm from exposure is not financial and cannot be undone by a credit freeze.

The usual reassurance from a cloud tool is encryption in transit and at rest. That is true and it is not the point. The point is that the file exists somewhere else, under somebody else's control, subject to somebody else's retention schedule and somebody else's subpoena.

Where an uploaded session ends up

On the vendor's storage, in their backups, in their disaster recovery copy, possibly with a sub-processor running the model, and in access logs that record when and by whom it was opened. Each of those is reasonable engineering. Together they are a list of places you cannot inventory for a client who asks.

A client may well ask who else can hear this. Anything other than nobody is a difficult answer to give in that room.

What Just Transcribe does

The model runs on the phone. The audio never leaves it and there is no account attached to it. If a client asks who else can hear the recording, the answer is nobody, and it is checkable in front of them by switching the phone to airplane mode.

With Advanced Privacy it goes further: the session records once, the audio is erased as soon as the transcript exists, and closing the screen clears what is left.

None of which makes recording the right clinical choice. It only settles the technical half, which is the half that was never the interesting part of the decision.

Why Just Transcribe

Three of these matter more in this profession than anywhere else on the site.

You can answer the client's question honestly. Nobody else can hear it, and you can demonstrate that in the room with airplane mode.
Advanced Privacy erases the audio. You take the text with you by exporting it, the tape is gone, and the session is cleared when you leave the screen. For a lot of therapeutic work that is the right shape.
No account means no shared surface. Nothing to be logged into on a second device, no password reset email, no vendor breach notification naming your clients' sessions.
Local summaries. Themes, key points and action items generated on the device, so the summary is not a second copy somewhere else.
Speaker separation on the device. A supervision recording comes back readable rather than as an undifferentiated wall.
Folders and full-text search. Keep supervision, intake and reflective notes apart, and find any of them by a phrase you remember.
One payment, EUR 9.99. A private practice does not need a subscription for note-taking, and certainly not one priced per seat.

If a client asks who else can hear the recording, the only answer that is fully reassuring is nobody, and it is the only one that is checkable in the room. Airplane mode on, record, transcribe. If the text appears, the model ran on the phone in front of them.

What to settle before you press record

Technology is the last of these, not the first.

Orientation only. Your professional body's guidance and your jurisdiction's law both outrank this table.
Informed consent	Specific, recorded, revocable, and separate from consent to treatment. What is recorded, why, who will hear it, how long it is kept, and what happens if they change their mind.
The effect on the work	A recorder changes the room and pretending otherwise is not clinical. Some clients will say less. That is a therapeutic question, not a technical one, and it is the reason to record less rather than more.
Special category data	In Europe, a session recording is health data under GDPR Article 9. Minimising it, keeping it in one place, and deleting it on schedule are all easier when there is only one place.
Retention and deletion	You promised a period. Keeping the file on one device means you can actually keep that promise, rather than trusting a vendor's deletion policy and their backups.
Professional secrecy	In many countries therapists hold a legal duty of confidentiality with specific exceptions. A vendor holding a copy is not one of the exceptions, it is just another holder.
Subject access requests	A client can ask for what you hold about them. Easier to answer completely when the answer is one folder on one device.

This table is orientation, not guidance. Your professional body publishes the real thing.

The consent paragraph, in words a client can actually use

I would like to record this session so my notes are accurate. It stays on this phone and goes to no company. The app turns it into text here on the device and then deletes the audio. I keep the text for as long as I told you and then delete that too. You can say no now, and you can change your mind afterwards and I will delete it.

If you cannot say that truthfully and in one breath, do not record. The version that needs no consent at all is the note you dictate once the client has left.

Setting it up for a practice

Four steps, and the first one is not about the app.

Write the consent paragraph before you install anything. What is recorded, why, that it stays on one device, that the audio is deleted once transcribed, how long the text is kept, and how to withdraw. If you cannot write that paragraph, do not record.
Download a model on wifi once. The larger ones handle quiet speech, emotion and overlapping talk noticeably better. After the download, no network is needed again.
Make Advanced Privacy your default for client audio. Records once, erases the audio as soon as the transcript exists, clears the session when you leave. Keep ordinary recording for your own dictation.
Set up folders and a deletion habit. One folder per purpose, and a fixed day of the week when you delete what is past its retention date. There is no server doing it for you, which is the point and also the chore.

Passcode, Face ID, automatic lock and device encryption are load-bearing now. A phone holding session transcripts is a filing cabinet that fits in a coat pocket, which is convenient in exactly the way that should make you careful.

Where Just Transcribe is the wrong tool

Including one that is about the profession rather than the software.

It does not make recording appropriate. The hardest question here is clinical, and a private app answers none of it. If recording would damage the work, the right number of recordings is zero.
No practice management integration. Nothing writes into your client record system. Export and paste, by hand.
No supervision sharing. A supervisor cannot open your transcript from their device. You export a file and send it however you already send files, with all the care that implies.
Not an emotion or risk analyser. It transcribes and summarises. It does not score affect, flag risk or interpret anything, and you should be sceptical of tools that claim to.
No live captions. Transcription runs after the session, so it cannot make a session accessible in real time for a deaf or hard of hearing client.
No recovery if the device is lost. No server, no backup on our side. That is the deliberate trade, and it means a device backup is your responsibility.

This is a very good notebook and not a clinical system. Used as a notebook it takes one worry away; used as a record system it will disappoint you.

Straight answers

Should I record therapy sessions at all?

Often no, and that is not false modesty about my own app. A recorder changes what a client is willing to say, and for a lot of work that cost outweighs the benefit of a perfect record. Where it clearly earns its place is training and accreditation, supervision, and your own notes immediately afterwards, which is the case that needs no client consent at all because the client is not on the recording.

What do I tell a client who asks where the recording goes?

That it stays on this phone, that no company receives it, and that if they like you can put the phone in airplane mode and watch the transcript appear anyway. With Advanced Privacy you can also tell them the audio is erased as soon as the text exists.

Does the summary feature read the session and interpret it?

No, and treat any tool that says it does with suspicion. The summary is a local language model producing bullet points, key points and action items from the transcript. It is a shortening, not a formulation. It does not score risk, detect emotion or suggest a diagnosis, and it has no clinical validation of any kind.

Can my supervisor listen to a recording I made?

Only if you hand them the file or play it. There is no sharing feature, no link, no shared folder. In practice that means exporting the transcript and sending it the way your practice already sends confidential documents. It is a real limitation, with one compensation: nothing is shared by accident, because nothing is shared at all.

Is a transcript safer than an audio recording?

Meaningfully, yes. Text carries the words without the voice, which removes the biometric identifiability and the tone that makes an exposed recording so much worse for a client. That is the reasoning behind Advanced Privacy: keep the words, erase the voice, as soon as the one can be made from the other.

Start with the case that needs no consent from anyone: your own note, spoken out loud in the ten minutes after a session. If that alone is worth it, the rest of the decision can wait until you have talked to your supervisor and your professional body about whether recording clients is right for your practice at all.

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Written by the developer, and not clinical or legal advice. I make Just Transcribe. Recording a therapy session is a clinical decision before it is a technical one: it changes the room, it needs informed consent, and your professional body almost certainly has guidance on it that outranks anything here.

Written 26 September 2026, updated 3 October 2026 for Just Transcribe 1.36. Numbers and sources on the fact sheet.