Recipes¶

Concrete, copy-pasteable setups for things people actually use dictate for. If you have a recipe worth sharing, open a discussion or send a PR to this page.

Dictating Slack messages with smart punctuation, no LLM¶

The default config already does this. Hold your hotkey, talk, release. You get raw Whisper output plus rule-based punctuation, nothing leaves your machine after the first-run model download. If you want a friendlier tone, enable cleanup but pick a small local model so latency stays under a second:

# config/cleanup.yaml
enabled: true
backend: ollama
model: llama3.2:3b
preset_overrides:
  chat:
    style: casual
    max_tokens: 200

Dictating Python or TypeScript¶

Switch your code preset to code-grammar mode so spoken keywords stay as keywords:

# config/presets.yaml
code:
  vocab: code
  code_grammar: true
  cleanup: false        # don't let an LLM rewrite source
  voice_commands: true  # "open paren", "new line", "delete that"

Then add the apps you write code in to the preset's apps list (VS Code, Cursor, JetBrains IDEs, Terminal). See code dictation for the full grammar.

Dictating into Obsidian / iA Writer (prose)¶

# config/presets.yaml
prose:
  vocab: prose
  code_grammar: false
  cleanup: true
  style: clean
  apps: ["md.obsidian", "pro.writer.mac"]

Cleanup here removes filler words ("um", "like", "you know") and fixes punctuation without changing meaning. Compare a few utterances in the WebUI history to find a style you trust.

Triggering dictate from Raycast¶

dictate ships with a Raycast extension under raycast/. Once installed, bind "Start dictation" to a global Raycast hotkey if you'd rather drive it from there than the menu-bar hotkey. See the Raycast guide.

Triggering dictate from a Stream Deck / Keyboard Maestro¶

Use the URL scheme:

open "dictate://start?preset=code"
open "dictate://stop"
open "dictate://toggle"

Any tool that can shell out or open a URL can drive dictate.

Per-project vocab (e.g. internal acronyms)¶

Drop a .dictate-vocab file in your project root:

Kubernetes
GraphQL
OAuth
acme-corp
WigmoreNet

dictate's context detector picks it up when the frontmost app's working directory is inside that project. See per-app vocab for the matching rules.

Redacting secrets before they reach a cloud LLM¶

If you ever turn on OpenRouter, the redactor scrubs API keys, AWS keys, JWTs and GitHub tokens before the request leaves your machine. To add your own pattern (e.g. an internal token format):

# config/redact.yaml
patterns:
  - name: acme-internal-token
    regex: 'acme_[a-zA-Z0-9]{32}'
    replacement: '[REDACTED:acme-token]'

Reload the config from the WebUI → Settings → "Reload" and the new rule is live without restarting.

Health-checking everything in one go¶

dictate doctor

Prints model status, permissions status, backend reachability (Ollama ping, OpenRouter ping if configured), and audio device list. Run this first whenever something's not working.