Dictation & dictionary

Hold the Fn key, speak, release. The text lands at your cursor. Whisper runs locally via Metal, and a personal dictionary teaches it your names and jargon.

How dictation works

• Push-to-talk: hold fn (the trigger key is configurable). Releasing the key stops recording and transcribes immediately.
• Silence protection: four layers keep Whisper's silence hallucinations ("thanks for watching…") out of your text: energy measurement, a known-phrase blacklist, no-speech probability, and independent buffers per dictation.
• Anywhere: the text is inserted into whatever app has focus. If the Lavox notebook is focused, it goes to the note's cursor instead.
• Memory: every finished dictation flows into the memory automatically (fire-and-forget, so it never slows the insert).

The personal dictionary

Whisper mishears names and technical terms. The dictionary fixes that with two mechanisms working together:

• Vocabulary biasing: your most-used terms are fed into the decoder as a prompt, making it far more likely to spell them right the first time. Meeting transcription uses the same list as hotwords.
• Deterministic replacement: learned misheard → correct pairs are applied to the transcript before insertion: case-insensitive, whole-word, zero latency, zero hallucination risk.

It learns from your corrections

After a dictation, the bar shows the transcript with a Fix button. Edit the text, save, and the diff teaches the dictionary:

• only term-like corrections are learned (proper nouns, technical terms, acronyms), never plain rewording
• each learned pair is at most 4 words; at most 4 pairs per session
• everything is stored in ~/Lavox/dictionary.json, a plain file you can read, edit or delete

Managing the dictionary directly

# list
curl -s localhost:8040/api/dictionary

# add a term (optionally with a known mishearing)
curl -s -X POST localhost:8040/api/dictionary/term \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"term": "Infisical", "misheard": "infiscal"}'

# remove
curl -s -X DELETE localhost:8040/api/dictionary/term/Infisical