Docs · Mac and Windows

AI cleanup

AI cleanup turns the way you talk into the way you’d write. Choose Off, Standard or Aggressive in Settings → Dictation. It works the same on Mac and Windows, and it’s included with blabe.

Choose a style

Open Settings… from the blabe menu, choose Dictation and pick a style under AI cleanup. The line under it sums up the one you chose:

  • Off: “Pastes your words verbatim.” AI cleanup leaves your text alone. Clean up speech, just above it, still removes “um” and “uh” unless you turn it off, and spelled-out letters, fixes and snippets still apply.
  • Standard: “Cuts fillers and false starts, and fixes grammar.” It turns rambling speech into clear text: it cuts fillers, repeats and false starts, fixes grammar, and adds lists and paragraphs.
  • Aggressive: “Rewrites into the shortest clear form. Check anything important.” It rewrites what you said into its shortest, clearest form, and aims to keep every point and how strongly you meant it.

With either style, the model is told to:

  • keep your meaning, names and numbers, and spell your Words exactly as you saved them;
  • write spoken symbols as symbols, so “dot env” becomes “.env”;
  • follow spoken commands such as “new paragraph” or “bullet point”;
  • treat a request in your dictation, such as “write me an email”, as text to keep, never as something to answer.

Nothing checks that its edit kept your meaning, so read anything important before you send it, especially to a coding agent.

What the pill shows

  • Cleaned up: AI cleanup changed your text.
  • Rewritten: Aggressive rewrote it.
  • Pasted without AI cleanup: AI cleanup was on, but blabe used the transcript without it. See below.

No message means cleanup had nothing to change, or the dictation was too short to need it.

If AI cleanup can’t run

AI cleanup never stops a dictation. If AI cleanup fails, blabe uses the transcript. Clean up speech, spelled-out letters, fixes and snippets still apply. The same happens if it can’t run or takes too long, and the pill says “Pasted without AI cleanup”.

A dictation of a few words with nothing to fix, such as “Sounds good.”, skips the cleanup pass.

Your original words

  • With AI cleanup on, Copy Last Transcript in the blabe menu copies the original transcript, before AI cleanup.
  • Your Words go to the cleanup model too, so names keep the spelling you saved.
  • Fixes, spelled-out letters and snippets run after AI cleanup, on your computer. See Words, fixes and snippets.

What is sent, and who handles it

Only when AI cleanup is on, and never your audio:

  1. blabe’s transcription service has Microsoft’s MAI-Transcribe 2 turn your audio into text, as it does for every dictation.
  2. The service sends the transcript and your Words directly to Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 27B open-weight model, run by Cerebras on blabe’s account.
  3. If Cerebras is slow or fails, the service also sends the same request directly to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Luna, on blabe’s account. It uses whichever answer comes first and cancels the other.
  4. It returns the cleaned text and your original transcript to the app, and stores neither.

Cerebras’s privacy policy says it doesn’t keep the inputs and outputs of its service. OpenAI doesn’t train its models on them, but it may keep a request to check for abuse, usually for up to 30 days. The privacy policy has the details.

Good to know

  • AI cleanup needs the internet, like the rest of blabe.
  • To compare a cleanup with what you said, choose Copy Last Transcript and paste the original next to it.