Parakeety for therapists and counselors
Therapists writing session notes have had two unhappy options for as long as Macs have been in private practice. Cloud dictation services get the audio off the laptop fast but route the words you said about your client through someone else's servers. Apple's built-in dictation cuts off mid-sentence and was never really designed for sustained note-taking. Parakeety takes a third path: on-device Mac dictation built for sustained note-taking. Hold §, talk through what just happened in the session, release; the note pastes at the cursor in whichever app you write notes in.
Where dictation fits in private practice
The honest workflow is between sessions rather than during them. The client leaves, you have ten or fifteen minutes before the next one arrives, and the choice is to type a hurried 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 disclose in your privacy notice. Parakeety is the same speed as the cloud option without that last step. Push the key, summarize the session, paste it into the record.
It pastes wherever the cursor is. That includes SimplePractice and TherapyNotes in the US, WriteUpp and BacPac in the UK, Cliniko and other tools 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 practice-management tool specifically. The integration is that the operating system already knows where your cursor is, and Parakeety pastes the transcript there.
Architectural vs contractual privacy
Confidentiality in therapy is a code-of-ethics question first. The BACP, UKCP and BPS ethical frameworks in the UK, the APA and ACA codes in the US, and the common-law duty of confidence sitting underneath all of them, expect therapists to take reasonable care that what a client says in the room does not end up where it should not. Cloud dictation services tend to handle that by writing a contract: a Business Associate Agreement under HIPAA, a written processing agreement under UK GDPR, a privacy notice that lists the vendor. 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. Nothing about the session traverses a network because there is no network call at transcription time. That is the architectural answer; whether your professional regime needs it or accepts the contractual one is a separate question, but it is a useful answer to have. There is a fuller treatment of the architectural-vs-contractual framing in HIPAA and dictation: architectural vs contractual privacy, including how the same distinction reads under UK GDPR and across the ethical frameworks therapists work under. Local dictation for clinicians restates the same architectural points in the clinical context.
Practical fit
- Each license covers one Mac. A laptop per therapist, or a shared admin Mac at reception, 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 session 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 practice-management 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.
What Parakeety is not
Worth being clear about. Parakeety is not a regulated mental-health software product. It does not have specific certifications for therapy use and is not on any vendor catalog. It does not record, transcribe or summarize sessions; it is push-to-talk for the moments after, when you are writing the note up. If your need is for a tool that captures the session itself with the client's consent, or 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 boundary in legal practice, where the underlying duty is privilege rather than therapeutic confidentiality.
FAQ
- Is Parakeety HIPAA-compliant or UK GDPR-compliant for therapy notes?
- Both questions are about how client information is handled in transit and at rest. Parakeety does not transmit audio anywhere; it processes the audio on the Mac in memory, pastes the transcript at the cursor, and discards the buffer. There is no PHI traversing a network and no data controller / processor relationship to declare, because the data does not leave the practice's Mac. That is the architectural privacy story rather than a contractual one. Whether your professional regime accepts it depends on your obligations and your supervisor; some teams are required to have a Business Associate Agreement (US) or a written data-processing agreement (UK) in place with any vendor that touches client information, in which case Parakeety is not the right shape of answer for that requirement. For most practices that simply want session content to stay off third-party servers, it is.
- Does it integrate with SimplePractice, TherapyNotes or WriteUpp?
- Parakeety does not integrate with practice-management systems specifically. It pastes the transcript at whichever cursor you are on, in whichever app you are using. That includes SimplePractice, TherapyNotes, WriteUpp, Cliniko, BacPac, Bacpac Connect, plus any text field in a browser, Word, Pages, or Notes. The integration is at the operating-system level rather than at the application level, which means there is nothing to install in the practice-management tool and no extension to maintain.
- Can it transcribe a recorded session?
- No, deliberately. Parakeety is push-to-talk only. You hold a key, dictate live, and release; it does not accept audio files as input, and it does not record sessions. That shape is intentional for therapy work: the tool is for writing the note up after the client has left, not for capturing what was said in the room. If your need is to transcribe an existing recording you have made with separate consent, MacWhisper is the conventional Mac tool for that. The two solve different problems.
- A private practice has several therapists. How does licensing work?
- One license covers one Mac. If each therapist has their own MacBook, you will want a license per Mac. There is no per-user licensing and no seat-based subscription. The license is per machine. For practices working out of a shared admin Mac at reception, one license on that machine covers everyone who uses it.
Try it
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.