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This page describes Dictum 0.5.

Your words and replace rules

Whisper knows common words well, but it guesses at names, products and terms: "a valonia" for Avalonia, "nexus five" for Nexus5. Dictum gives you two tools for this:

  • Your words come before recognition. Each profile has a list of words, and Dictum shows them to Whisper as a hint, so it leans towards your spelling.
  • Replace rules come after recognition. They are a processor that finds text and replaces it, exactly as you say.

Start with your words. Add a replace rule when a word still comes out wrong the same way every time.

Your words

How your words work

Before each dictation, Dictum puts the profile's words into the speech hint, a short text Whisper reads before it listens. Whisper then prefers those spellings when the sound fits.

  • The hint holds 400 characters, together with the profile's Speech hint. Words that do not fit are left out, from the end of the list. Put the most important words first.
  • Words help only in the profile they belong to. Each profile has its own list.
  • If the profile's language is Auto, a word list can pull language detection towards the list's own language. Set the profile's languages: see Languages.
  • A remote speech server gets the same hint, as the request's prompt.
  • The built-in LLM prompts do not use your words. A prompt of your own can, through {{vocabulary}}: see LLM clean-up.

In the setup wizard

Step 4 of the setup wizard is Your words.

  1. Type your words in the box, one per line, or paste a list separated by commas: One per line, or paste a comma-separated list.
  2. Click Next.

The words go to your first profile. When you run the wizard again, the box shows that profile's list, and the list becomes what the box holds when you finish.

In Settings → Profiles

  1. Open Settings → Profiles and select the profile.
  2. Under Your words, type a word in Add words — Enter or paste many and press Enter. To add many at once, paste a list with one word per line, or separated by commas or semicolons.
  3. Each word becomes a chip. The × on a chip removes it. Words: 12 shows how many there are.

A word that is already in the list, in any letter case, is not added again.

Speech hint, under the words, is extra text Whisper reads before them, such as a sentence in the style you dictate. Most people leave it empty.

From the command line

Note

On Windows, the MSI does not put dictum on PATH. In PowerShell, run it by its full path, for example & "$env:LOCALAPPDATA\Programs\Dictum\dictum.exe" vocab list. In the AppImage, put dictum after the file name: ./dictum-<version>-linux-x64.AppImage dictum vocab list.

dictum vocab edits the word list of the first profile, or of the profile you name with --profile. A running Dictum picks up each change at once.

dictum vocab add Avalonia Nexus5 "VS Code"
dictum vocab list
dictum vocab remove "VS Code"
dictum vocab clear
dictum vocab add --profile profile Kubernetes
  • add puts words at the end of the list. Quote a phrase with spaces.
  • remove takes words out, in any letter case, and warns about any that were not in the list.
  • clear empties the list.
  • list prints the list, one word per line.

Each change prints the profile and the count, such as dictate: 3 word(s).

To add many words from a file, write one per line. Blank lines and lines that start with # are skipped:

# Names
Avalonia
Nexus5
Kubernetes

dictum vocab import words.txt

dictum vocab import - reads the list from standard input.

When the hint runs out of room, dictum vocab warns you: warning: the speech hint holds 400 characters, so these words are left out: …. Put the most important words first.

Replace rules

Create a replace rules processor

  1. Open Settings → Processors and click + Replace rules. The new processor is named rules (then rules-2 and so on).

  2. Fill in the rules. Each rule has a Find and a Replace box, and under them four boxes to tick:

    Field What it does
    Find The text to find.
    Replace The text to put in its place. Empty deletes what was found.
    Regex Find is a .NET regular expression instead of plain text.
    Match case Find only this exact letter case, in plain text and in a regular expression. Unticked, avalonia also finds Avalonia.
    Whole word For plain text: match only whole words, so main leaves mainframe alone.
    On Untick to keep the rule in the list without applying it.

  3. To add a rule, type in Find on the blank row at the end. The rules apply in order, from the top.

  4. Make sure a profile runs the processor. A new processor joins every profile whose processing chain is empty. Otherwise the list marks it In no profile: pick a profile in Add to profile…, as LLM clean-up shows. See also Troubleshooting.

Some rules that fix what Whisper writes:

Find Regex Replace Match case Whole word
a valonia Avalonia yes
nexus five Nexus5 yes
\bvs code\b yes VS Code

In a regular expression, Match case works as for plain text, but Whole word does not apply: use \b for word edges. $1 in Replace puts back the first group in brackets. A regular expression that takes longer than 200 ms on one text is skipped.

Import rules from a CSV file

Import from CSV… adds rules from a file with the columns Find, Replace, and optionally Match case and Whole word:

Find,Replace,Match case,Whole word
a valonia,Avalonia,,yes
nexus five,Nexus5,,yes
  • A first row whose first cell is Find or Знайти is skipped, and so are blank lines.
  • Cells are separated by commas or by semicolons, whichever the first line has more of. Excel writes semicolons on some systems.
  • true, yes, 1, x, так or + ticks a box.
  • Imported rules are plain text, not regular expressions. Lines that cannot be read are named and skipped.

Their order in the processing chain

A profile's Processing chain runs its steps from top to bottom, and each step gets the text the step above returned. Where you put the rules matters when the profile also has an LLM prompt:

  • Rules before the LLM prompt: the language model sees your corrected words and keeps them in context.
  • Rules after the LLM prompt: your rules have the last word, whatever the model wrote.

To change the order, open Settings → Profiles and select the profile. Under Processing chain, each step shows its number, its name and its kind, such as rules with Rules: 3 and cleanup with LLM prompt. Drag a step by its handle, or focus it and press Alt+↑ or Alt+↓.

To check the result, run text through the profile's chain:

dictum process "i build the ui in a valonia" --profile dictate

--pipeline rules runs only the rules, and --json shows how long each step took.