Using the dictionary
Transcription engines are great at everyday speech and clumsy with the words that are specific to you — coworkers' names, product names, codebase jargon, medical or legal terms. Speakey's dictionary is how you fix that, permanently and locally.
There are three things it does, in increasing order of force: it learns words you use, it corrects toward vocabulary it knows, and it replaces exactly what you tell it to.
Vocabulary — words Speakey should know
Add a name or term to your vocabulary and Speakey will steer ambiguous transcriptions toward it. Say a colleague's unusual surname and instead of a phonetic guess you get the real spelling. Vocabulary is organized into categories (one list per topic — work, a game, a project) so you can turn sets on and off.
Correction is deliberately conservative: it skips very short words, never overrides a word already in your dictionary, and only steps in when the engine was genuinely unsure — so it sharpens your jargon without mangling ordinary text.
Replacement rules — always swap X for Y
A replacement rule is an unconditional find-and-replace applied to every transcript: expand kubectl from "cube cuttle," force a particular casing, fix a brand name the engine always butchers. Rules are exact and fire every time, so reach for them when a correction needs to be guaranteed rather than suggested.
In the correction popover, clicking a suggestion (or pressing Enter) learns the word — it joins your vocabulary and nudges future matches. The separate + Rule button creates a hard replacement that fires unconditionally. Learning is the gentle, safe default; rules are the sledgehammer. Keeping them on different buttons stops you from creating an over-aggressive rule by accident.
Learning — it picks up what you use
As you dictate and accept corrections, Speakey tracks which words you actually use and weights them with recency, so your real vocabulary rises to the top over time. You don't have to curate everything by hand — using Speakey is what trains it.
Vocabulary packs
Don't want to type out a few hundred terms? Speakey offers ready-made packs — programming, proper names, medical, gaming, business — that you can import in one step. Grab them from the vocab packs page and import the file from the Dictionary panel.
Where it's stored
The whole dictionary is a plain folder you own: %APPDATA%\io.speakey.app\dictionary\ on Windows, ~/.local/share/io.speakey.app/dictionary/ on Linux — one text file per category plus your replacement rules. Speakey watches it and hot-reloads edits live. Because it's just files, you can author your own categories by hand, sync it across computers, and it travels with you.