Getting a good result on a modest PC

No graphics card, 8 GB of memory, an older laptop — what Blabb does for you automatically and what is worth changing

UPDATED 2026-07-28

Blabb runs on a machine without a graphics card. It is slower, and there are two or three settings worth changing, but nothing here requires new hardware.

What Blabb does on its own#

Cleanup runs on the graphics card by default and falls back to the processor when there is no compatible card. You do not have to arrange that, and Blabb does not interrupt a dictation to tell you about it. Where you see it said is in Settings: switch from Original to any cleanup style on a machine that scores poorly for this work, and this appears as the change is saved — every time you make that switch.

No graphics card was detected, so AI cleanup runs on the processor and is slower — the first result takes a moment to warm up. To skip cleanup for instant text, set the style to "Original". Your setting is unchanged.

The last sentence matters. Nothing is switched off behind your back; the message is telling you what to expect and offering you the shortcut if you want it.

What to change, in order#

1. Cleanup style. This is the one setting that reliably changes how a modest machine feels. In Settings → Writing style → Cleanup style, choose Original for text that appears with no cleanup step at all, or Fix typos for spelling and grammar correction at the lowest cost of the styles that still run the model.

If you have been using Clear, Professional or Friendly and finding Blabb sluggish, this is almost certainly why.

2. Leave Transcription mode on General unless you need the medical or legal vocabulary. The specialist packs add a spelling pass and extra context for the cleanup model, which is work a slow machine does not need to do twice a sentence.

3. Close the thing you were not using. A browser with forty tabs, or an office application left open since this morning, is competing with Blabb for the same memory. Closing one is often worth more than any setting change.

The honest part#

Blabb is not a small program. The models are the reason: the cleanup model is about 2.2 GB and the speech model about 1.5 GB, and both are loaded into memory to do their work. With both of them up, Blabb holds several gigabytes. After fifteen minutes with nothing to do the cleanup model is unloaded and roughly 2 GB of that comes back, while the speech model stays resident.

On an 8 GB machine that is a real share of what you have, and it is the thing to weigh up before you install it. It works — but plan on Blabb and a browser, not Blabb and everything you had open already. Original is the setting that keeps the large model out of memory entirely.

If free memory gets very low, dictations are cancelled. When available system memory drops below 500 MB, Blabb cancels the dictation rather than push the machine into thrashing. Nothing appears in the interface when that happens — the dictation simply produces nothing. The log records it, at %LocalAppData%\Blabb\logs\.

That silence is worth knowing about, because it is easy to misread as a microphone fault. If dictations vanish on a loaded machine and reappear once you close a few applications, this is what you were seeing.

What a modest machine does not cost you#

Accuracy. Transcription quality does not depend on how fast the processor is — the same model does the same work, it just takes longer. A five-year-old laptop with a good headset produces better text than a new workstation with a microphone across the desk.

See also#

• Slow or stuttering — when it is worse than merely slow.
• What makes Blabb fast or slow — where the seconds go.