Custom vocabulary

What custom vocabulary fixes

General transcription is very good at ordinary language and predictably bad at the words that are specific to your life: your colleagues' names, your company's internal acronyms, the library you have been debugging all week.

Custom vocabulary is a list of terms you care about and the exact spelling you want. When a dictation contains something that matches, VoiceSnap Pro rewrites it to your version before the text is typed. You fix a word once instead of correcting it every day.

Adding a term

Open Settings → Vocabulary and click Add. A term has one required field and two optional ones.

• Written form — exactly how it should appear, including capitalisation: PostgreSQL, not postgresql.
• Sounds like — one or more spoken forms, written the way you say them. Add these when the word is not pronounced the way it is spelled.
• Match case exactly — on for identifiers and product names, off for ordinary words that can start a sentence.

Names

Names are the highest-value entries because getting one wrong in an email is more embarrassing than any other transcription error. Add the people you write to and about: colleagues, clients, managers, the team you keep tagging.

For a name whose spelling and pronunciation diverge, fill in the sounds-like field: Siobhán with a sounds-like of “shiv awn”, Xiuying with “shoh ying”, Ng with “ing”. Do the same for place names and street names that keep coming out phonetically.

Acronyms and initialisms

Acronyms split into two kinds and each needs a different sounds-like. Spelled-out ones — GDPR, API, SDK, CRM — are said letter by letter, so write the sounds-like the way the letters sound: “gee dee pee are”. Ones pronounced as a word — SaaS, NASA, ARIA — need the word: “sass”.

Mixed-case forms are what the written field is for. OAuth, iOS, gRPC, PagerDuty and macOS all have a capitalisation only you know is correct, and the written form is copied exactly as you typed it.

• Spelled: GDPR ← “gee dee pee are”. KPI ← “kay pee eye”.
• Word: SaaS ← “sass”. JIRA ← “jeera”.
• Mixed case: OAuth ← “oh auth”. iOS ← “eye oh ess”.
• Add the dotted variant separately if your house style writes U.S. rather than US.

Jargon, product names and code identifiers

Everything you say a hundred times a week and always have to fix belongs here: Kubernetes, Tailwind, Postgres, webhook, idempotent, the internal codename nobody outside your company has ever heard.

For code, add the identifiers that are two English words with no space — useEffect, getUserById, VoiceSnap Pro itself — and let the case commands from Voice Commands handle the ones you only say occasionally.

Building the list without sitting down to write it

Do not try to fill the list in one session. Add a term the moment it annoys you, and once a week open the notes library and skim recent dictations for the same mistake appearing twice — those are the entries worth adding.

For a list you already have, Settings → Vocabulary imports a plain text file (one term per line) or a CSV with written form, sounds-like and case columns. Duplicates are merged on import, and the whole list can be exported the same way when you set up a second machine.

How and when it is applied

Vocabulary is applied on your machine, after the transcription comes back and before the text is typed. The list itself is not sent anywhere — it is part of your settings, not part of the audio request.

It applies in every language you dictate in, which is what you want for names and product names: Kubernetes is Kubernetes in a German sentence too. If a term is genuinely ambiguous with a common word, switch on Match case exactly and keep the sounds-like specific, so the entry fires on the phrase you meant and nothing else.