What happens to your files

This page describes the hosted service at tryscriptorium.com. If you run Scriptorium on your own hardware, none of the uploading below happens at all — see About. The rules for using the service are in the terms of service.

Where your file goes

When you upload a video or audio file, it is transmitted over HTTPS to the Scriptorium server and written to disk there. Transcription runs on that same server: the speech model is installed locally and your audio is not forwarded to any third-party transcription API.

Your file and its transcript are stored against your account. Every account is isolated at the database level — no other user can list, read, search or export your material.

Administrators can see account details and file information such as titles, sizes and dates, which running the service needs. Opening a recording or transcript itself needs a separate permission, and every time that happens it is written to an audit log. As with any hosted service, the people who operate the server also have technical access to the stored data.

How long it is kept

With an account: until you delete it. Deleting a transcript removes it from your library immediately and sends a deletion request to an administrator; the uploaded file, any audio proxy generated from it and the transcript are erased when that request is approved. An administrator may also configure a retention period, after which finished transcripts are removed automatically.

Without an account (the free preview): the temporary account created for you, the file you uploaded and the transcript are all deleted automatically after 24 hours. There is no way to sign back into that temporary account, which is why anything you want to keep should be downloaded, or moved to a free account, before then.

Your files are not used to train anything

The speech model is trained in advance and is not updated from your uploads. Your recordings and transcripts are not routinely read or reviewed, are not used for model training, and are not sold or shared with third parties.

Deleting your account

Deleting your whole account starts a short review period with a cancel window, rather than an instant irreversible wipe — signing back in during that window cancels it. When it completes, every file, transcript, search index entry and database row belonging to the account is removed.

What else is recorded

The server keeps ordinary operational records: a pageview count (IP address, browser user-agent and path — never page content or cookies), which is pruned after 30 days, and application logs that identify accounts by a shortened id rather than by name. This site also uses Google Analytics for aggregate traffic measurement; transcript content is never sent to it.

Optional AI features

Scriptorium includes optional recipes that can send a transcript to a cloud AI provider for summarising. These are off unless an administrator explicitly enables them with their own API key, and the state is shown in Settings. The default "copy as prompt" action transmits nothing at all — it puts text on your clipboard.

If the recording is genuinely confidential

We would rather say this than sell you something. If a recording is covered by legal privilege, medical confidentiality or a contractual duty, the correct answer is not to upload it to a service somebody else operates — ours included. Scriptorium can be self-hosted on hardware you control, where no upload happens at all. That is the arrangement to use for material like that.

Questions

See Contact & support.