Custom Vocabulary

Teach VocaMac Your Words

Speech models handle everyday language well but stumble on the words that matter most to you: coworkers’ names, product names, acronyms, and technical jargon. “kubectl” becomes “cube control.” “Grafana” becomes “graph on a.” Every transcription ends with a manual fix.

Custom Vocabulary targets exactly the words you use. Give VocaMac a short list of the terms it keeps getting wrong, and it hints them to the model so they come out spelled correctly from the start.

How It Works

Open Settings → General → Custom Vocabulary and type the terms you care about, one per line or comma-separated:

kubectl, PostgreSQL, nginx, Grafana

VocaMac passes these to Whisper as a transcription hint, biasing it toward your spelling. Keep the list focused and put your most-mistranscribed terms near the top; WhisperKit applies its own prompt-token budget. There is no training step. The updated list is used on the next transcription attempt, although it remains a hint rather than a promise.

For best results, enter terms in the language you dictate and set a matching transcription language above. In Auto-detect, your vocabulary can even nudge VocaMac toward the right language.

Private by Design

Your word list never leaves your Mac. Like every other part of VocaMac, custom vocabulary is applied entirely on-device — nothing is uploaded to build or store a dictionary. Your names, projects, and jargon stay yours.