# Introduction

What Blabb is, what it does with your voice, and what it never does.

Blabb is a dictation utility for Windows. You press a shortcut, speak, and the words appear
in whatever you were already typing in — an email, a chat box, a code comment, a form field
in a remote desktop session. There is no separate window to paste out of.

Two things happen between your voice and the text on screen. Speech recognition turns the audio
into words, punctuation and all. A small language model then applies the
[cleanup style](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) you picked — which, depending on the style, might
mean changing nothing at all, tidying the spelling, or trimming the rambling out of a paragraph you
thought aloud.

Both of those run on your machine.

> [!IMPORTANT]
> Your audio is never uploaded. Neither is the transcript. Speech recognition and the AI
> cleanup are on-device, and the app has no cloud transcription provider to fall back to.

## What you need

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 1809 (build 17763) or newer. Windows 11 recommended. |
| Architecture | 64-bit Intel or AMD. There is no ARM64 or 32-bit build. |
| Microphone | Any Windows input device — laptop array, headset, or USB microphone. |
| Graphics | Optional. Blabb offloads layers to a GPU when one is available and runs on CPU when it is not. |

The speech and language models ship inside the app. There is no first-run download and no
account needed to reach the point where you can test it.

## How the pieces fit

1. You press the shortcut. Blabb starts capturing from your microphone.
2. You speak for as long as you like. Blabb listens for pauses to decide where to split the audio
   into pieces it can transcribe — not to decide when you have finished.
3. You press the shortcut again to finish.
4. Speech recognition turns the audio into words, and the cleanup style tidies them — or leaves
   them exactly as they are, which is what it does out of the box.
5. The text is delivered into the window that had focus.

Step 5 is why Blabb works in places other dictation tools do not: the text arrives as ordinary
Windows input rather than through a plugin installed inside the application. It reaches locked-down
environments — Citrix, RDP, virtual desktops — though those are also the places where you may need
to change how the text is delivered. See
[Citrix, RDP and virtual desktops](/docs/common-issues/remote-desktop/).

## Where to go next

- [Install and activate](/docs/get-started/install/) — getting the app and unlocking it.
- [Your first dictation](/docs/get-started/first-dictation/) — the 60-second version.
- [The overlay pill](/docs/get-started/the-pill/) — the small control that stays on screen.
- [Cleanup styles](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) — the six ways your words can be tidied up.
- [Nothing gets typed](/docs/common-issues/nothing-gets-typed/) — the most common first problem.

Once it is working, [the settings tour](/docs/configuration/settings-tour/) walks through every
page of Settings and what each one is for.