# Medical and legal vocabulary

What Transcription mode changes, how the specialist vocabulary is applied, and the things it deliberately does not do.

Some jobs have a vocabulary a general speech model has never really heard. Blabb ships two
specialist word lists for exactly that — one medical, one legal — and you turn one on in
Settings → **Writing style → Transcription mode**.

Three options: **General**, **Medical**, **Legal**. One at a time, not both.

## It is a vocabulary, not a style

This is the thing most people get wrong on the first day, so it is worth stating plainly.
Transcription mode does not change how your words are tidied up. It changes which words Blabb
knows.

The two settings sit next to each other and do different jobs:

| Setting | What it decides |
| --- | --- |
| **Transcription mode** | Which specialist terms Blabb recognises. |
| **Cleanup style** | How your words are tidied — the tone and the tightening. |

Because they are independent, the vocabulary applies to **every** cleanup style, including
**Original**. If you want the raw transcription with no rewriting at all, but you still want
"metoprolol" and "voir dire" spelled properly, that combination works.

## How it actually works

Blabb looks up what the speech model heard against the specialist list. It matches on how close the
spelling is — up to two letters different — with a fallback that compares how the word sounds, so a
badly mangled term is still caught.

Two safeguards keep that from mangling ordinary English: only words of five letters or more are
considered, and only words that are not already in Blabb's general English dictionary. Short words
and everyday words are never touched.

What happens to the matches then depends on your cleanup style, and the difference is worth
understanding:

| Cleanup style | What the vocabulary does |
| --- | --- |
| **Original** | The corrections are applied directly to your text. No model is involved in the decision. |
| Every other style | The matches, and what each term means, are handed to the cleanup model, which decides in context whether to apply them. |

That split is deliberate. Original has no cleanup model to consult, so the deterministic corrections
are its only help. The other styles do have one, so the terms go in as informed suggestions rather
than blind substitutions — which is what lets Blabb tell a genuine drug name from a similar-sounding
English word.

> [!NOTE]
> The consequence is that a term Blabb heard as a plausible English phrase — "loo poos" for lupus —
> needs the cleanup model to fix it, because only the sentence around it says which was meant. On
> **Original**, that class of mistake is left alone.

## What it does not do

There are no templates. No note formats. No citation formatting. Blabb will not lay out a SOAP note
or format a case citation for you, and nothing about the medical or legal vocabulary is trying to.

It is vocabulary and context, and that is the whole of it. What it buys you is that the specialist
words come out spelled correctly the first time.

## Getting one

Medical and legal are separate plans, and they cost more than the base plan. Both modes are always
listed in the Transcription mode picker, whether or not you have paid for one — an edition you do
not hold shows locked, with a note saying which subscription it needs. They are shown rather than
hidden on purpose: someone who dictates clinical terms all day has to be able to see the pack
exists.

After you upgrade, press **Refresh** on the Account page to pick the new plan up. See
[Subscriptions and plans](/docs/account/subscription-and-plans/).

> [!TIP]
> No word list can know your colleagues' surnames, your clinic's abbreviations or your matter
> names. Those are what [saved words](/docs/cleanup-styles/saved-words/) are for, and they work
> alongside the specialist vocabulary rather than instead of it.

## Next

- [Medical vocabulary](/docs/editions/medical/) — about 48,000 terms, and what changes in practice.
- [Legal vocabulary](/docs/editions/legal/) — about 13,000 terms of art and Latin phrases.
- [Teach Blabb your words](/docs/cleanup-styles/saved-words/) — for the words no list contains.
- [Subscriptions and plans](/docs/account/subscription-and-plans/) — buying, upgrading, and Refresh.