---
title: "Recording & Transcription"
description: "A map of the three places you can record and transcribe audio in Voicebox — dictation, captures, and voice-profile samples."
---

## Overview

Voicebox records and transcribes audio in three different contexts, each
feeding a different surface in the app. This page is a map; follow the links
for the detail.

| Goal | Where | Docs |
|---|---|---|
| Speak and have your words land in another app | Global hotkey → Captures tab + auto-paste | [Dictation](/overview/dictation) |
| Record a thought, a meeting, or a voice memo inside Voicebox | Captures tab | [Captures](/overview/captures) |
| Record a clip to clone a voice from | Voices tab → profile samples | [Creating Voice Profiles](/overview/creating-voice-profiles) |

All three paths share the same STT backend — it's the surrounding workflow
that differs.

## Dictation

The 0.5.0 headline feature. Hold a chord anywhere on your machine, speak,
release. The transcript lands in whatever text field you had focused,
cleaned up by a local LLM if auto-refine is on. Captures accumulate in the
Captures tab for later replay or re-transcription.

Covered end-to-end in [Dictation](/overview/dictation).

## Captures tab

When you don't need to paste into another app — you just want a clean
transcript of some audio — the Captures tab is the home. Record in-app,
drop in a file (`.wav`, `.mp3`, `.m4a`, `.webm`, `.opus`, `.flac`), or dig
through dictations that already landed there. Every capture keeps its
original audio, can be retranscribed with a different model, and can be
played back through any voice profile you have.

Covered in [Captures](/overview/captures).

## Voice profile samples

A separate flow, in the Voices tab. When you're creating a profile from an
audio clip, the sample is what the cloning engine actually learns from —
the `reference_text` on a sample must match the audio *verbatim*, which is
why samples are a different data model from captures.

You can promote a capture to a sample from the Captures tab's Send-to menu
("Use as voice sample…"), which opens a reference-text confirm dialog so
you can correct the last ~10% of transcript accuracy before saving.

Covered in [Creating Voice Profiles](/overview/creating-voice-profiles).

## Transcription models

All three paths share the same Whisper models. Pick a default in
**Settings → Captures → Transcription**; override per capture if you need
to.

| Model | Size | When to pick it |
|---|---|---|
| Whisper Base | ~300 MB | Fast. Default. Good for clean speech. |
| Whisper Small | ~500 MB | Better quality, still fast. |
| Whisper Medium | ~1.5 GB | High quality. |
| Whisper Large | ~3 GB | Best quality, slow on CPU. |
| Whisper Turbo | ~1.5 GB | Large-tier quality, ~5× faster than Large. |

On Apple Silicon the model runs through **MLX-Whisper** (~8× faster than
PyTorch). Everywhere else it runs through PyTorch `transformers`. The
backend picks the right one — you don't configure it.

<Callout type="info">
  For noisy clips, prefer **Turbo** or **Large**. Base can hallucinate on
  hard inputs — most famously the "thanks for watching" loop. Voicebox
  strips those loops deterministically before LLM refinement runs, so a
  capture can be cleanly re-refined even if the raw transcript has them.
</Callout>

## Language

You can pass a language hint for short clips (under ~5 seconds) where
Whisper's auto-detect is unreliable. Set a default language lock in
**Settings → Captures → Transcription → Language**, or override per capture.

## Transcription API

Developer-level detail on the STT backend, model loading, preprocessing, and
the `/transcribe` endpoint lives in the
[Transcription developer guide](/developer/transcription). The Captures
pipeline also exposes `/captures` as a higher-level endpoint that wraps
STT + archival + optional refinement in one call — see
[Captures](/overview/captures#api-surface).

## Next steps

<Cards>
  <Card title="Dictation" href="/overview/dictation">
    Hold a chord anywhere on your machine, speak, release.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Captures" href="/overview/captures">
    The paired audio + transcript archive.
  </Card>
  <Card title="Creating Voice Profiles" href="/overview/creating-voice-profiles">
    Record or upload samples for voice cloning.
  </Card>
</Cards>
