Power features: voice commands, snippets, dictionary, and AI polish

The mic button is the visible ten percent of tautau. Underneath it are four features that compound: voice commands that punctuate and edit as you speak, snippets that expand a spoken trigger into a whole template, a personal dictionary that teaches the transcriber your names and jargon, and an AI polish pass that tidies the transcript before it lands. None of them require configuration to start working (they are on by default), but each one rewards a few minutes of setup. Here is the full tour.

Voice commands: the full reference

Voice commands run at the moment your transcript is inserted into the field, so they work no matter which recognition path handled your audio. You speak them naturally, mid-sentence. If you ever want raw transcripts without command processing, the toggle lives in the extension options.

• "period" and "comma": insert a full stop or a comma where you say them.
• "question mark", "exclamation mark", "colon", "semicolon": exactly what they sound like.
• "open quote" and "close quote": wrap a spoken phrase in quotation marks.
• "new line": insert a line break, for multi-line messages and lists.
• "new paragraph": insert a paragraph break, for longer text.
• "scratch that" or "delete that": remove the last sentence you dictated. The fastest way to recover from a sentence that came out wrong.
• "delete word": remove just the last word, for the smaller stumbles.

Voice snippets: speak a trigger, get a template

Snippets turn the things you type repeatedly into spoken shortcuts. Say "insert" followed by your trigger word, and the saved text expands into the field. They are managed in the extension options (right-click the tautau toolbar icon, then Options), where you can add, edit, and remove trigger-expansion pairs. A few ideas that pay for themselves quickly:

• "insert signoff": your email sign-off, name, and title, expanded in full.
• "insert address": your postal address for forms, the classic repetitive-typing offender.
• "insert standup": your daily standup skeleton, ready to fill in by voice.
• "insert meeting": a meeting-notes template with headings for attendees, notes, and actions.
• "insert link": any URL or boilerplate you paste more than twice a week.

Personal dictionary: your names, your spellings

Every account has a personal dictionary on tautau.xyz/settings: a list of terms, up to 200, that belong to you. It does two jobs at once. First, the terms are passed to the speech model as hints, so a surname like "Ebsworth" comes out with your spelling instead of the model's best guess. Second, the same terms feed the AI polish pass as preferred spellings, so the cleanup step respects them too.

The dictionary earns its keep anywhere a speech model would otherwise guess: colleagues' names, client names, project codenames, internal service names, product jargon. Add a term once on the settings page and every dictation after that gets it right. This is the single highest-value setting if you dictate about work, because work is where the weird words live.

AI polish: what it does and what it never does

AI polish is a server-side cleanup pass that runs after transcription. It fixes punctuation and capitalisation, removes filler words ("um", "uh", the repeated start of a sentence you abandoned), and generally turns spoken ramble into written prose. It is on by default, and you can toggle it in the extension options or per-dictation in the tautau.xyz playground.

The boundaries matter more than the features: polish never changes your meaning, and it preserves your line breaks, so the structure you spoke with "new line" survives. If the cleanup pass fails for any reason, you get the raw transcript instead; a failed polish never fails your dictation. Think of it as a careful copyeditor with a narrow brief, not a ghostwriter.

The keyboard shortcut, and your safety net

Clicking the mic button is not the only way in. Cmd+Shift+V on Mac (Alt+Shift+V on Windows) toggles recording for the focused field, and right-clicking a field offers "Start voice dictation" in the context menu. While you record, a live level meter shows the mic is hearing you, and when you stop, instant playback lets you hear exactly what was captured.

The safety net is history: if you are signed in, every dictation is saved to your private, searchable history on tautau.xyz with audio replay. The paragraph you dictated into a web form that then ate your submission is not gone; it is in your history, transcript and recording both, and you can delete any item (or all of it) whenever you like.

Putting it together

A good first configuration takes about five minutes: add three snippets, add the five names your work revolves around to the dictionary, and leave polish and commands on. After that the features disappear into the habit, which is the whole idea. Install tautau from the Chrome Web Store if you have not already: five dictations a day free with an account, no credit card, and the power features are included from the first one. The mic button was the beginning; the rest of this is where the time actually comes back.