The words are wrong
Find out in five seconds whether Blabb misheard you or cleanup rewrote you, then fix the right half of the problem.
UPDATED 2026-07-28
Two completely different things produce the same complaint. Either the speech model misheard you, or it heard you correctly and the cleanup style changed the words afterwards. The fixes have nothing in common, so find out which one it is before you change a setting.
Ask this first#
Open the History window and find the dictation. Each entry can show three things:
| View | What it is |
|---|---|
| Original words | The raw transcription, exactly as the speech model heard you |
| Final text | What was actually typed into your document |
| What changed | The difference between the two |
What changed answers the question on its own. If the wrong word is already there in Original words, the speech model misheard you. If Original words is right and Final text is wrong, cleanup changed it.
The History window covers searching and filtering if the dictation was a while ago.
If the speech model misheard you#
Work down this list. The first two are worth more than the rest combined.
Your microphone and how loud you arrive#
Microphone quality and placement decide more about accuracy than any setting in Blabb. A headset microphone a few centimetres from your mouth beats a good microphone across the desk.
- Microphone setup — which microphone, and where to put it
- Windows microphone levels — arriving loud enough to be heard, and not so loud that you clip
Your room#
Hard surfaces, an open-plan office, a fan, a window onto a road. The model hears all of it. Your room covers what is worth doing something about.
How you are speaking#
This one surprises people: the models are trained on natural speech at natural speed, so over-enunciating and slowing down deliberately make recognition worse, not better. Speak the way you would to a colleague. How to speak has the detail.
Specific words it keeps getting wrong#
Names, products, acronyms and the local jargon are not in any general model's vocabulary. Teach them once in Saved words — "when you say this, use this spelling" — and Blabb applies them both as a hint to the speech model and as a correction pass over the raw transcription before cleanup runs. If cleanup then changes a taught term, the rewrite is discarded, so the taught spelling survives either way. See Saved words.
Whole fields of vocabulary#
If it is not one word but hundreds — drug names, anatomy, case citations, Latin — that is what the medical and legal vocabularies are for. They apply to every cleanup style, including Original. See Medical and legal vocabulary.
If cleanup changed it#
This is usually the cleanup style doing exactly what it was asked to do. Clear, Professional and Friendly are all allowed to rewrite; that is the point of them.
Two things to try:
- Move down the ladder. Original keeps exactly what you said and runs no cleanup model at all. Fix typos corrects spelling and grammar and nothing else. See Cleanup styles.
- Match the style to the writing. A style that suits a chat message is the wrong tool for a clinical note or a quoted paragraph. If the exact words matter — figures, doses, names, anything you are quoting — stay on Original or Fix typos for that work, and save the heavier styles for prose where a better sentence is genuinely welcome.
If cleanup produced something you object to rather than something merely wrong, report it. The Report AI content button sits on the history entry itself.