Most accuracy problems come from three things: the microphone is too far away, the room is too loud, or the words you need are not in any general vocabulary. All three are fixable in a few minutes, and the fix lasts.
Work through them in this order — the first two cost nothing and matter most.
1. Fix the microphone before anything else
- Distance: 15 to 30 cm. Past about half a metre the room starts contributing as much as you do.
- Position: slightly off-axis. Speak across the microphone rather than
straight into it, so
pandtdo not pop. - Pin the device. Settings → General → Input Device. On Automatic, your operating system can move the default when you plug in a webcam or a headset, and the first sign is worse recognition.
A wired headset is the cheapest real upgrade there is. Details and the Bluetooth trade-off in Choose the right microphone.
2. Speak the way you would to a colleague
- Normal pace. Slowing down and over-enunciating usually makes things worse, not better.
- Full sentences. The formatter uses sentence shape to place punctuation, so a complete thought punctuates better than three fragments. Recordings under about three seconds are also the hardest for language detection.
- Keep going through a stumble. Say the correct version and carry on; Sprecho drops false starts and repeated words.
- Do not dictate punctuation. Full stops, commas, question marks and paragraph breaks are added for you. Saying "comma" out loud tends to get the word comma written down.
The most reliable habit anyone can adopt: one dictation, one complete thought. Long enough to give the model context, short enough that you can check it at a glance.
3. Take the room seriously
In order of damage: other people talking, echo from hard surfaces, steady fan or traffic noise, keyboard clatter. Background speech is worst because it is exactly what the recogniser is looking for.
You do not need a studio. Closing a door, moving away from a fan, or turning slightly away from an open-plan aisle is normally enough.
4. Teach it your words
This is the step that separates "good enough" from "never has to be corrected".
Open the Dictionary in Sprecho and add:
- Client and colleague names.
- Company, product and project names.
- Domain jargon and abbreviations you use daily.
Two options are worth knowing:
- Correct a misspelling. Instead of only adding a word, you can record what Sprecho keeps hearing and what it should write instead — for example sara → Sarah. The replacement is then applied automatically.
- Pin to recognizer. The star on a dictionary entry pushes that word into the recogniser itself, so it is biased towards hearing it in the first place rather than being corrected afterwards. Pin the handful of terms that matter most; it is a stronger effect than a plain entry.
Sprecho also learns on its own. With Auto-dictionary on (Settings → System → Extras), a word you correct right after a dictation is offered as a dictionary entry, and the Dictionary page collects these as Suggestions you can accept or reject in bulk.
Full walkthrough in Teach Sprecho your words with the dictionary.
5. Repeated phrases belong in snippets, not in your mouth
If you dictate the same paragraph every week — a disclaimer, an address, a standard sign-off — make it a snippet and trigger it by voice. It is faster and it cannot be misheard, because it is not being recognised at all. See Snippets: voice shortcuts for text you repeat.
Quick diagnosis
| What you see | Most likely cause |
|---|---|
| Everyday words are wrong | Microphone distance or room noise |
| Everyday words are right, names are wrong | Missing dictionary entries |
| The first word of a dictation is often lost | You started speaking before the key was fully down |
| Punctuation is sparse or odd | Fragments rather than full sentences |
| Quality dropped suddenly | The input device changed — check Input Device |
| A specific word is wrong every single time | Add it as a correction rule and pin it |