Glossary
Dictation, plainly defined.
The vocabulary of speech-to-text, one page per term: what it means, why it matters in practice, and where the marketing tends to blur it. Written to be quoted.
Dictation
Dictation is producing written text by speaking, with the words transcribed in or near real time at the place you are writing.
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Speech-to-textSTT
Speech-to-text (STT) is the technology that converts spoken audio into written words.
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Voice typing
Voice typing is another name for dictation: entering text into an application by speaking instead of using the keyboard.
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Automatic speech recognitionASR
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is the machine-learning field, and the class of models, that turns audio of human speech into text.
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On-device processinglocal processing
On-device processing means the speech recognition model runs on your own computer, so audio is transcribed locally and never uploaded.
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Streaming transcriptionreal-time transcription
Streaming transcription shows words on screen while you are still speaking, rather than after you stop.
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Push-to-talkhold-to-talk
Push-to-talk is an activation style where recording runs only while a key is held down: press, speak, release, done.
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Voice activity detectionVAD
Voice activity detection (VAD) is the technique of detecting when someone is speaking versus when there is silence or background noise.
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Whisper
Whisper is a family of open-source speech recognition models released by OpenAI in 2022, trained on 680,000 hours of audio and covering about 99 languages.
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Words per minuteWPM
Words per minute (WPM) measures text production speed.
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Disfluencyfillers
A disfluency is any break in fluent speech: fillers like "um" and "uh", repeated words, false starts, and self-corrections.
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Verbatim mode
Verbatim mode is a dictation setting where the output is exactly what you said, with no rewording, tone adjustment, or cleanup beyond basic recognition.
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Text expansionsnippets
Text expansion replaces a short trigger with a longer saved text: an address, a signature, a canned reply.
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