Parakeety for clinicians and GPs

The honest workflow is between consultations rather than during them. The patient leaves, you have ninety seconds before the next one walks in, and the choice is to type a hurried free-text summary, dictate to Apple's built-in tool that mishears half of it, or send the audio to a cloud service that you have probably had to write into someone's data-protection paperwork. Parakeety is the same speed as the cloud option without that last step. Push the key, summarize the visit, paste it into the record.

It pastes wherever the cursor is. That includes EMIS, SystmOne and Vision in UK general practice, Cliniko or Heydoc in private clinic settings, plus any text field in a browser, Word, Pages, Notes, or whichever combination of tools your practice has settled on. Parakeety does not integrate with the record systems specifically. The integration is that the operating system already knows where your cursor is, and Parakeety pastes the transcript there.

Cloud dictation services tend to handle the privacy question with a contract. They sign a Business Associate Agreement under HIPAA, or point at their UK GDPR posture and their data-processing addenda. That works for many practices. The cleaner answer for the same problem is to not transmit the audio in the first place.

Parakeety processes audio on the Apple Neural Engine, in memory, in around 0.2 seconds for a ten-minute dictation, then discards the buffer. There is no cloud upload to negotiate a contract around. There is no PHI traversing a network because there is no network call at transcription time. That is the architectural answer; whether your practice's compliance regime needs it or accepts the contractual one is a separate question, but it is a useful answer to have. The longer piece on HIPAA and dictation: architectural vs contractual privacy walks through what each model can and cannot do for clinical workflows, including the audit conversation that follows from each. We covered some of the broader compliance angle in Parakeety vs Wispr Flow. Local dictation for therapists covers the same architectural argument for private therapy practice.

• Each license covers one Mac. A dedicated dictation Mac at reception, or a personal MacBook per clinician, both shapes are fine; the model is one license per machine.
• Audio is captured to a memory buffer while the key is held. As soon as you release, the buffer goes through the speech model, the transcript pastes at the cursor, and the buffer is discarded. Nothing is written to disk. Nothing is logged.
• The model auto-detects the language. If a consultation has switched between English and another European language, the dictation follows.
• The push-to-talk key is currently the section key (§, below Esc). A user-configurable shortcut is on the roadmap, which matters if you have already mapped that key in your clinical software.
• First launch downloads the speech model (around 600 MB) and asks for microphone and accessibility access. After that the app lives in the menu bar and runs offline.

Worth being clear about. Parakeety is not a clinical-grade or regulated medical device. It does not have specific certifications for medical use. It does not record, transcribe or summarize audio it has captured during the consultation itself; it is push-to-talk for the moments after, when you are writing the note up. If your need is for live ambient transcription during the visit, or for a tool with a contracted Business Associate Agreement in place with the vendor, this is not the right shape of answer. Local dictation for lawyers covers the same shape of question in legal practice, where privilege rather than HIPAA does the load-bearing work.

Parakeety is a Mac menu-bar app. Hold the section key, talk, release; your words paste at the cursor in whichever app you were typing into. Audio never leaves the machine. There is a free 7-day trial with no card required. After that it is $30 once.

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