Custom Vocabulary
Give Wave a list of the names, products, and jargon you actually say, so transcripts stop mangling them.
Transcription is good at everyday speech and bad at the words only your world uses — your CTO's surname, an internal product codename, a drug or a statute. Custom vocabulary is a list of those words that Wave hands to the transcriber before it starts, so they come out spelled the way you'd write them.
What's worth adding
- People's names — colleagues, clients, and interviewees, especially uncommon spellings
- Product and company names — yours and the ones you talk about
- Acronyms and internal shorthand — team names, project codenames, metrics
- Field-specific terms — clinical, legal, or technical vocabulary the transcriber wouldn't have seen
Adding a word doesn't force it into every transcript. It tells the transcriber that word is plausible, which is enough to tip a close call in the right direction.
Adding words
Your list is stored on your account, so it applies no matter which device you record on.
Your list appears below as Your words with a count. Tap the x next to any entry and confirm to remove it. If a word is already on the list, you'll see Already in your list instead of a duplicate.
Writing entries that actually help
- Spell it the way you want it in the transcript. Wave uses your spelling verbatim, capitalization included.
- Keep phrases short. Entries longer than six words are dropped before they reach the transcriber, so add "Mount Sinai Beth Israel", not a whole sentence.
- Stick to plain letters (A–Z), numbers, spaces, and hyphens. Everything else is stripped out before your list reaches the transcriber, including punctuation, accented letters (é, ü, ñ), and non-Latin scripts. "Müller" is sent as "Mller", and an entry written entirely in another script does nothing. Where you can, add the unaccented spelling.
- Add the variants you say out loud. If your team says both "K8s" and "Kubernetes", add both.
- Add full names, not just surnames. "Sarah Nguyen" gives the transcriber more to work with than "Nguyen".
- Don't dump your whole glossary in. A focused list of terms you genuinely say beats hundreds of entries, and only the first 1,000 are used (see the FAQ).
Custom vocabulary only applies to recordings transcribed after you add it. It won't retroactively fix transcripts you already have.
Fixing transcripts you already recorded
An existing transcript won't change on its own, but you have two ways to correct it:
- Edit the transcript directly. Open the session's transcript and fix the wrong text in place — see editing summaries and transcripts.
- Re-transcribe the audio. Add the words first, then open the session, open its customize panel, go to the Language tab, turn on the retranscription switch (Retranscribe the audio on your phone, Full Audio Retranscription on the web and desktop), and reprocess. Wave rebuilds the transcript from your audio with the new vocabulary in play. Details in Language and Translation.
FAQ
There's no cap in the app, but Wave sends at most the first 1,000 entries to the transcriber, and only the first 200 for recordings set to some less common languages. The words you added first are the ones that count, so keep the list to terms you actually say.
Yes. It's stored on your account, so adding a word anywhere applies to every recording you make, on any device.
Vocabulary raises the odds, it doesn't guarantee. Check the spelling and capitalization of your entry, make sure the phrase is six words or fewer and uses only plain letters, numbers, and hyphens, and consider adding the variation you actually pronounce. Unclear audio is the other common cause. For some languages, including recordings set to Chinese, the transcriber can't use custom vocabulary at all.
Only indirectly. Summaries are written from the transcript, so a more accurate transcript gives you a more accurate summary.
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