# When a specific word keeps coming out wrong

Four causes, four different fixes. Work out which one you have before you change anything.

One word, wrong every time, in an otherwise good transcript. There are four reasons that happens
and they need four different fixes, so the useful first step is working out which one you are
looking at rather than trying things.

## Find out who changed it

Blabb produces your text in two stages: the speech model writes down what it heard, then cleanup
tidies it. A word can go wrong in either. Fixing the wrong stage does nothing.

Open the **History** window and find the dictation. Each entry can show **Original words** — the
raw transcription, exactly as the speech model heard you — alongside the **Final text** that was
typed, and **What changed** between them.

| What you see | Which stage | Read on |
| --- | --- | --- |
| The word is already wrong in **Original words** | The speech model misheard you | The next three sections |
| The word is right in **Original words**, wrong in **Final text** | Cleanup changed it | The last section |

That one check saves more time than anything else on this page. See
[History](/docs/get-started/history/) for the rest of what the window shows.

## Is it a name or a term Blabb cannot know

Your colleague's surname, your product name, an internal system, an unusual place name. The model
has never seen it and never will, so it writes down the nearest ordinary word.

Teach it. **Settings → Writing style → Saved words** takes "when you say X, use this spelling Y".
Saved words are used twice — as a hint to the speech model while it listens, and again as a
straight find-and-replace over the raw transcription, before any cleanup style sees it. If a
cleanup style then changes a term you taught, Blabb treats that as the rewrite having gone wrong
and discards it, so a word you teach survives to the end.

This is the highest-return fix on the page. Full instructions in
[Saved words](/docs/cleanup-styles/saved-words/).

## Is it a specialist term

Medicine and law have their own vocabularies, and they are large enough that teaching them one word
at a time is not sensible. **Transcription mode** in **Settings → Writing style** switches Blabb to
Medical or Legal — around 48,000 terms for medicine, around 13,000 for law, matched against your
raw transcription and then given to cleanup as context.

It applies to every cleanup style, including Original, because it is a vocabulary rather than a
style. It is a separate plan; see [Medical and legal vocabulary](/docs/editions/overview/).

If your field is neither, saved words is still the answer — a few dozen taught terms covers most
trades.

## Is it a homophone

"There" and "their". "Discreet" and "discrete". "Right" and "write". These sound identical, so the
speech model has nothing to go on and picks one.

Here is the realistic position. Cleanup fixes a good number of these from the surrounding sentence,
because the grammar usually makes only one of them possible. It does not fix all of them, and it
never will — where both readings are grammatically fine, no amount of context settles it. If you
are on the **Original** cleanup style you get none of this correction at all, since Original runs no
cleanup model; moving to **Fix typos** is the cheapest improvement available.

For the ones that survive, the honest advice is to correct them as you edit. A homophone that only
you can disambiguate is not something a saved word can help with either, because the spoken form is
the same for both.

## Is the word simply not being heard

If the word disappears entirely, or comes back as something with no phonetic resemblance at all,
this is not a vocabulary problem. Something is wrong on the audio side — the microphone is too far
away, the level is too low, or the room is loud enough to bury a quiet syllable.

Start with [Choosing and placing your microphone](/docs/accuracy/microphone-setup/), then
[Setting your microphone level in Windows](/docs/accuracy/windows-microphone-levels/). Words
dropped at the start or end of a sentence in particular are almost always this, not vocabulary.

## When cleanup is the one changing it

If **Original words** has the word right and the **Final text** does not, the speech model did its
job and cleanup rewrote you. Two things to try, in order:

1. Move to a lighter cleanup style. **Fix typos** corrects spelling and grammar only; **Original**
   keeps exactly what you said and changes nothing.
2. Check the rewrite in History before you decide. **What changed** shows you exactly which words
   the style touched, which tells you whether it is a style that is too heavy for this kind of
   writing or a one-off.

If it is a spelling rather than a rewrite, teach it as a saved word — the correction goes in before
cleanup, and a rewrite that changes it afterwards is discarded, so it wins.

## See also

- [Saved words](/docs/cleanup-styles/saved-words/) — teach Blabb a name or term.
- [History](/docs/get-started/history/) — where "What changed" lives.
- [Medical and legal vocabulary](/docs/editions/overview/) — for specialist terms in bulk.
- [Choosing and placing your microphone](/docs/accuracy/microphone-setup/) — when the word is not
  being heard at all.