Teach Dictera the names it keeps getting wrong
A speech model that gets 99% of your words right will still spell your colleague's name wrong every single time. Replacements are the fix: a list of phrases that get rewritten before the text lands in your document.
Where to add one
Open Settings, choose Vocabulary, and use Add Replacement under the Replacements heading. Each rule is two fields: the spoken phrase on the left, what you want written on the right. It saves as you type; there is no Save button.
The examples in that pane are the shape of a good rule: "i phone" becomes iPhone, "git hub" becomes GitHub, "doctor smith" becomes Dr. Smith. Write the phrase the way the transcript spells it, not the way you think you said it. If you are unsure, dictate the word once into a text field and copy what came out.
How the matching works
Three rules cover almost everything you will run into:
- Case does not matter. One rule catches "acme", "Acme" and "ACME".
- Whole words only. A rule for "cat" never rewrites "category", so short phrases are safe to add.
- The longest phrase wins. A rule for "John Smith" runs before a separate rule for "John", so the full name comes out right rather than half-corrected.
Replacements are the last step of a dictation, after the cleanup model has finished. An explicit rule you wrote has the final say on how that word is spelled.
Translate as you speak is the one exception: there the rules run before the translation, not after. A name has to be repaired in the language it was spoken in, or it gets translated along with the sentence and no rule can reach it any more.
Where the rules stop
Replacements shape dictated prose, and only that. They are not applied to a meeting transcript - for a recorded call, names and terms go in the background field in Meeting Setup instead. They are also skipped when you dictate an instruction to edit a selection, because that sentence is a command for the model rather than text to insert.
The list lives in vocabulary.json on your Mac. It is yours to back up, and a second Mac starts with an empty one, because there is no account to sync it through.
Worth ten minutes once
Add rules for the five or six words you correct most: your product, your team, the clients whose names no transcriber has ever managed. It is the same pane that holds the spoken punctuation commands. The rest of what happens between speaking and typing is on the dictation page, and what is stored where is listed on the security page.
