Personal dictionarycustom vocabulary
A personal dictionary is the list of words a dictation tool has been taught to spell your way: names, products, jargon, and anything the speech model would otherwise write as the most probable English. It is the single most effective fix for the errors that repeat.
A speech model has seen "Kubernetes" far less often than "kuber netties", and it has never seen your colleague’s surname at all. Left alone it writes the likeliest spelling of the sounds, and it will do so every single time, which is why the mistakes that matter in dictation are not the random ones but the ones that recur. A dictionary tells the tool, once, what you meant.
Implementations range from a plain word list you edit by hand to tools that notice when you correct a word and offer to remember it. The second kind is the one that gets used, because nobody maintains a list.
How the dictionary is applied
Two ways, and the good tools use both. Biasing: the recognizer is told these words are likely, so it prefers them when the audio is ambiguous. Repair: after recognition, the output is checked for the known mishearings of each term ("kuber netties", "cube or netties") and they are replaced with the correct spelling. Repair is what makes a dictionary work for the words a model cannot be biased toward, and it is what lets a tool fix a name it has mangled the same way for the tenth time.
Learning, with permission
The best signal that a word belongs in the dictionary is you fixing it. A tool that watches for that edit and offers to remember the word builds a vocabulary you never had to type. The line to hold is consent: nothing should enter the dictionary without you saying yes, because a tool that silently learns from every edit will learn your typos too, and because a list of everything you have corrected is personal data.
Beyond a word list
A dictionary is a fixed list. Some vocabulary is better read from context: the names in the thread you are replying to, the file and symbol names in the project you have open. A tool that reads those locally, for the duration of one dictation, extends the dictionary to whatever you are looking at without you saving anything. That is the developer-mode idea, applied to writing.
In Flit
Flit notices when you fix a word by hand and offers to remember it, keeps usage counts so the terms you actually say win, and repairs the engine’s known mishearings of each term.
It learns your vocabulary, and asks first →Questions
Fair questions.
How do I teach my dictation app a name?
Add it to the personal dictionary, or in a tool that learns, fix the word once and accept the offer to remember it. From then on the tool prefers your spelling and repairs its usual mishearing of the word.
Does the dictionary sync between devices?
In cloud tools with an account, usually yes. In local tools, it lives on the Mac and travels with a backup or an export. That is the trade for the list never leaving your machine.
Why does my tool keep getting the same word wrong?
Because a speech model writes the most probable spelling of the sounds, and for your names and jargon the probable spelling is wrong every time. That is exactly what a personal dictionary fixes.
Where this shows up on flit.fyi
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