Every dictation app, no matter how good, has one weak spot. It isn't punctuation. It isn't accents. It's you: your name, your colleague's name, the product you work on, the medical term you type fifteen times a day, the acronym your whole industry lives on. Generic speech recognition is trained on generic speech, and the words that matter most to you are, almost by definition, the ones it has heard the least.
If you've ever watched "Kowalczyk" turn into three random syllables, or "the Henshaw file" become "the hen shore file", you know exactly the feeling. It's not a small annoyance either. It's the single biggest reason people give up on dictation software altogether, right after they'd started to trust it.
We've just added the fix. PeekoType now includes custom vocabulary and voice-triggered text snippets, both running entirely on your own PC, and both aimed squarely at this one problem.
The short version: you can now teach PeekoType the specific names, jargon and acronyms it keeps getting wrong, and save whole blocks of text to be typed out on a single spoken phrase. Both features are included in PeekoType at £39 once, with a free 14-day trial.
What custom vocabulary actually does
Custom vocabulary is exactly what it sounds like: a list of words and phrases you add yourself, so PeekoType knows to listen out for them specifically. Add the name of your business partner, the Latin term you use every week, the abbreviation your team uses for a project, or the surname that autocorrect has never once got right, and recognition for those particular words improves from the very next sentence you dictate.
You don't need to be technical to use it. Open the vocabulary panel, type in the word or phrase, and it's added to your personal list immediately. There's no training process, no waiting, and nothing to upload, because the whole list lives on your own computer and is used only by your own copy of PeekoType.
This matters most to anyone with a specialist vocabulary that generic software simply hasn't encountered often enough to learn well. If you're a solicitor dictating case references, a clinician writing up patient notes, or a writer with recurring character names in a novel, this is the feature that finally closes the gap between "impressive most of the time" and "reliable enough to lean on every day".
Voice-triggered text snippets: say it once, type it every time
The second new feature solves a different, equally familiar problem. Some things you don't just say often, you say the exact same thing, word for word, over and over. Your email sign-off. A standard disclaimer at the bottom of a report. The same three-line introduction you give every new client. Dictating that in full each time is not exactly the labour-saving promise of voice typing.
With snippets, you save that block of text once and give it a trigger phrase. Say "insert signature", and your full sign-off appears instantly, formatted exactly as you saved it. Say "insert disclaimer", and the whole paragraph is typed out in one go. It's a small feature with an outsized effect on how fast repetitive writing actually gets, and it pairs beautifully with PeekoType's existing natural-language edit commands, which let you say things like "delete that last sentence" or "scratch that" to tidy up as you go.
A quick example
- Without custom vocabulary: you dictate a client's name, watch it come out wrong, stop, manually correct it, and carry on, three or four times in one email.
- With custom vocabulary: you add the name once, and it's recognised correctly from then on, in every document you dictate.
- Without snippets: you dictate the same closing paragraph, word for word, in every single email you send.
- With snippets: you say four words, and the whole paragraph appears.
Why this stays offline, and why that matters
It would be easy to build custom vocabulary as a cloud feature, syncing your word list to a server somewhere so it follows you between devices. We didn't do that, and it's a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. Whatever you add to your vocabulary list, whether that's a client's name, a confidential project codename or a patient's condition, never leaves your computer. There's no account to create, no server storing your personal word list, and nothing to worry about if you're bound by client confidentiality or UK GDPR. Our guide to GDPR-compliant voice typing goes into more detail on exactly why on-device processing makes that conversation so much simpler.
This is the same principle behind everything else PeekoType does. We tested a wide field of competing tools in our round-up of voice-to-text apps, and the ones that offer personalisation almost always do it by sending your data to their own servers to "learn" from it. PeekoType's approach is different: the learning happens in a plain list on your own hard drive, and it's yours alone.
Who benefits most
| Who you are | What custom vocabulary fixes |
|---|---|
| Legal and professional services | Case references, client names, statutory terms |
| Healthcare and clinical roles | Drug names, conditions, clinical shorthand |
| Writers and researchers | Character names, place names, recurring terminology |
| Small business owners | Product names, supplier names, industry jargon |
| International teams | Colleagues' names, region-specific abbreviations |
How to get started
- Download PeekoType and start your free 14-day trial. No card required.
- Open the vocabulary panel and add the handful of names or terms you know trip up most dictation software.
- Save your most-used sign-off or disclaimer as a snippet with a short trigger phrase.
- Dictate as normal. You should notice the difference within the first document.
If you're brand new to dictation altogether, our voice typing for beginners guide is a gentle place to start before you dive into personalisation. And if you're comparing PeekoType against the wider field, our Dragon dictation alternative article shows how a modern, offline, AI-based app now holds its own against software that costs many times more.
The bottom line
Good dictation software gets the ordinary words right. Great dictation software gets your words right, the names, the jargon and the phrases that make up the actual substance of your work. Custom vocabulary and text snippets are how PeekoType closes that gap, without ever sending a single word of your personal vocabulary anywhere but your own machine.
Both features are already included in PeekoType at no extra cost. Try the free 14-day trial from our homepage, or drop us a line at support@peekotype.com if you'd like a hand getting your vocabulary list set up.