Dictionary

Colleagues' names, products and technical terms that keep coming out wrong go into the dictionary. It takes effect on every dictation, right after recognition, wherever the recognition happens and whether or not the cleanup is on. It needs neither a connection nor your account to do that.

Two lists

• Your words. A single term Stenowise should know about. It travels along as a hint for the recognition, and afterwards a mis-hearing that comes close to it is pulled back to the right spelling.
• Replacements. A pair of spoken and written. What you say is replaced by what should be on the page. That is how a spoken "aka" becomes a written "acceptance criterion".

The rule of thumb: if your word is only ever misheard, it belongs in your words. If you deliberately say something other than what should end up written, it is a replacement.

When each one applies

The order is the same on every dictation:

1. Your replacements are applied, character for character and with no leeway.
2. Your words are held against the text, and whatever is close enough is corrected.
3. Only then comes the cleanup, if it is on.

Your words have two brakes on them, so the list cannot break more than it fixes:

• A word that is spelled correctly in the dictation language is never replaced by an entry. An ordinary word is not a mis-hearing, however close it looks to one of your terms.
• An inflected form of an entry is left alone. "Token" does not become "Tokens" just because "Tokens" is on the list.

Suggestions

Stenowise watches for unknown words that keep coming back while you dictate and puts them in front of you as suggestions. A word has to have been dictated at least three times, twice of them mid-sentence. The second half matters: at the start of a sentence everything is capitalised, which says nothing about a name.

You accept a suggestion or you dismiss it. A dismissed one does not come back.

Learning from corrections

This one is off in the shipped state. You will find it in the settings, under Data and privacy.

Switched on, Stenowise watches the field you just dictated into for 90 seconds after pasting and notes which single words you swap out by hand there. The same swap has to turn up in three separate dictations before it goes into the dictionary. Once is a slip, three times is a habit.

What is captured is the word changes and nothing else. Field contents are neither stored nor sent, and the analysis happens on your device alone.

Every addition can be undone, and what you have undone is never learned again.

Code editors, terminals, chat and note applications are left out by default. The list is in the same settings, and you can add programs to it or take them off.

Importing from a file

Stenowise reads a file with one entry per line, in three shapes:

• spoken,written, also with a semicolon or a tab instead of the comma
• spoken -> written
• a single word with no counterpart, which then lands in your words

Header rows, comments and blank lines are recognised and skipped.

Before anything is added, you see every line of the file: either as a new entry or with the reason why it will not become one. Already in the dictionary, only one side filled in, too long, twice in the file. Nothing goes missing quietly.

On every device

Syncing between devices is a switch, and in the shipped state it is off. Without it your dictionary lives on this machine only, and a fresh install starts from nothing.

Turn it on and your entries are stored encrypted on the Stenowise server, so your second device can fetch them. It is the words and the replacements only, never any dictated text. Turn it off again and the copy on the server is deleted.

A sync round that does not get through is not an error and changes nothing. If you are signed out or offline, the round is skipped and caught up next time. What happens in the meantime is precisely nothing: the dictionary carries on locally, undisturbed.