Your dictation dictionary
2 min read
Speech-to-text is only as good as its grasp of your vocabulary - project names, tool names, jargon. DevThrottle keeps one shared dictionary on your Gateway, and a cleanup pass applies it to transcriptions after the text comes back. On a Gateway you host yourself, that covers every voice surface - dictation and Speak on every Director, and voice-note transcription: teach it a term once and the next transcription is corrected, with no restarts and no copying files around.
On DevThrottle's hosted Gateway, dictation and Speak do not yet read the dictionary this page edits - voice note transcription does. This is a known gap in the shipped product, and it is being fixed.
The Dictionary page
Open Dictionary in the Cockpit's left rail. It has two lists:
- Vocabulary - your canonical spellings. The cleanup pass corrects toward these: after transcription, a word or short phrase close enough to one of your terms is replaced with the term. The terms are not sent to the speech model itself - correction happens on the text, inside your Gateway, after it comes back.
- Common mistranscriptions - the correct term paired with the wrong spellings you have actually seen. A listed wrong spelling is corrected every time it appears, exactly; unlisted near misses are left to the cautious matching above.
Edit, then Save. The dictionary is read fresh each time it is used, so a saved edit applies to the next transcription that reads it: the next voice note recording, and on a Gateway you host yourself the next dictation too. If you try to leave with unsaved changes, the page stops you and asks.
What the cleanup pass will and will not do
The cleanup pass never rewrites your text freely: every change is a validated find-and-replace, and the replacement is always one of your own terms. It applies your listed corrections exactly, and it also fixes unlisted near misses of your terms - conservatively, so an ordinary word that merely resembles a term is left alone. A transcript with nothing close to your terms comes back untouched, and if a correction pass fails part-way, the raw transcript is delivered instead.
One caution: a damaged dictionary file is not shrugged off - it can fail the transcription request itself. If transcription suddenly errors after a hand edit to the dictionary file, the dictionary is the first place to look.