How your text is entered
The four text entry methods, what each one costs you, and which to reach for when text lands badly.
UPDATED 2026-07-28
When Blabb has your words, it still has to get them into the window you were working in. There are four ways to do that, and they behave differently depending on how the app was built. The setting lives in Settings, Shortcut & text entry, under Text entry.
The four methods#
| Method | The app's description |
|---|---|
| Direct | "Places your words straight into the text box. The fastest option for most apps." |
| Paste | "Pastes everything at once when you finish speaking. Great for long dictations." |
| Type fast | "Types your words quickly. A safe choice for almost any app." |
| Type slowly | "Types one letter at a time. The slowest option, but works when nothing else does." |
Which to try when#
Type fast is the default, and it is the one to stay on. It types, quickly, the way a keyboard does, which is what almost every window is expecting. It handles any character, including accented letters and the curly quotes that come out of Blabb's text cleanup.
Direct hands the text to the text box itself rather than typing it, which is quick when it works. It has a hard limit worth knowing: it only applies to the first insertion into an empty field. Put the cursor in a box that already has text in it and Direct declines, because setting the value would replace what is already there rather than add to it. That is why it can look like it works once and then stops.
Paste is the one to reach for when you dictate long. It does not wreck your clipboard — Blabb saves whatever text you had, pastes, and puts your text back. What it cannot save is non-text clipboard content: if you had an image or copied files on the clipboard, those are gone.
It is also not one single paste. Text is flushed as you speak, roughly every 150 milliseconds, and each flush is its own paste. So a long dictation is many pastes, not one, and length is not free.
Type slowly is not a universal last resort, despite the description. It presses one physical key per character, and characters that have no key on your current keyboard layout cannot be pressed. If the text contains anything outside plain ASCII, it refuses before typing a thing and Blabb falls back to Type fast. For accented or non-Latin text it is strictly worse than Type fast. Reach for it only when a sluggish or remote window drops characters typed at full speed, and your text is plain English.
When a method cannot apply#
You do not have to get this right first time. When the method you chose cannot apply — Direct into a non-empty field, Paste with the clipboard locked, Type slowly given a non-ASCII character — Blabb falls back to Type fast once and types the text there instead. It is one hop, not a chain: if Type fast is the one failing, there is nowhere further to fall.
Tip
Stay on Type fast unless something is wrong. If text lands badly in one app, try Direct, then Paste if the dictation is long. Change it for the one app that misbehaves rather than for everything — Per-app settings is built for exactly that.
The one case no method fixes#
Windows will not let an unelevated application send input into a window that is running as administrator. Blabb sends the text, Windows drops it, and nothing at all appears — no error, no warning, no red dots. It looks identical to Blabb having failed.
If one particular window swallows everything and every other window is fine, check whether that window was started as administrator. Changing the text entry method will not help, because the block happens after Blabb has done its part, and the automatic fallback to Type fast is blocked in exactly the same way.
Important
This is silent by design in Windows, not a bug in Blabb. It is the single most common reason "nothing gets typed" in one app and works everywhere else.
Remote and virtual desktops#
A remote session is a different case again. The window you are looking at is a picture of a machine somewhere else, and what the remote end accepts varies with how it was configured — clipboard redirection in particular is often turned off by policy. See Remote desktop.