# Your first dictation

Press F9, say a sentence, and watch it type itself into whatever window you were in.

## The 60-second version

1. Click into somewhere you can type — an email, a chat box, a text editor.
2. Press [[F9]].
3. Say a sentence.
4. Press [[F9]] again to finish, and watch the words type themselves in.

That is the whole loop. There is no window to copy out of and nothing to paste.

> [!TIP]
> Speak the sentence you want to end up with, at the speed you would say it to a colleague. These
> models are trained on ordinary speech — dictating slowly and over-enunciating makes recognition
> worse, not better.

## What you get out of the box

Blabb starts on the **Original** cleanup style, which means your words are typed as the speech
model heard them. Punctuation and capitalisation are there — the speech model produces them, you do
not have to say them — but nothing is rewritten.

That is a deliberate starting point: on day one you see exactly what Blabb heard, with nothing
changed. Once you trust it, [choosing a cleanup style](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) is the single
biggest change you can make to the output.

## What the pill is telling you

A small overlay sits on screen while you dictate. It does not label what it is doing — it shows
you, in this order:

- Seven dots moving with your voice, while audio is being captured.
- The dots settling once you finish, while your words are being worked out.
- The text arriving in the window you were in.

If the dots turn red, something went wrong. Blabb does not interrupt you with a dialog about it.

You can drag the pill somewhere less distracting. It stays where you drop it. There is more on it
in [The overlay pill](/docs/get-started/the-pill/).

## Stopping

Recording runs until you end it. Press [[F9]] again — or, on hold-to-speak, release the keys.

Silence does not stop it. Blabb listens for pauses to decide where to split the audio for
transcription, not to decide that you have finished, so you can stop and think mid-sentence without
being cut off, and there is no maximum length. The flip side is that a recording you walk away from
keeps running until you come back and press the key.

If you decide mid-sentence that you do not want the text, press Stop on the pill. Nothing is typed
and nothing is written to your history.

## Things you can say

Once you move off Original, the cleanup styles understand spoken commands. The most useful ones on
day one:

| Say | You get |
| --- | --- |
| "new line" | A line break |
| "new paragraph" | A blank line and a new paragraph |
| "scratch that" or "I mean" | The words you just cancelled disappear, and only your correction is typed |
| "question mark", "comma", "at sign" | The actual mark, when you clearly mean it as a command |

There is a full list in [Spoken layout commands](/docs/cleanup-styles/spoken-layout/) and
[Correcting yourself as you speak](/docs/cleanup-styles/spoken-corrections/).

## If nothing appeared

The usual causes are microphone permission and where the focus actually was when you pressed the
key. Work through [Nothing gets typed](/docs/common-issues/nothing-gets-typed/).

## Next

- [Cleanup styles](/docs/cleanup-styles/overview/) — the six ways your words can be tidied up.
- [A tour of Settings](/docs/configuration/settings-tour/) — where everything lives.
- [Choosing and placing your microphone](/docs/accuracy/microphone-setup/) — the biggest lever on accuracy.