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Say three words, get a paragraph
A snippet is a spoken trigger that expands into a block of text. The setup takes ten minutes and removes the six things you retype every week.
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What a snippet is, and is not
Text expanders have existed for years, triggered by typing an abbreviation. A voice snippet is the same idea driven by speech: you are already dictating, you say the trigger phrase, and the block appears in the flow of the sentence.
That matters because the alternative — stopping dictation, typing an abbreviation, resuming — breaks the thing that makes dictation worth doing.
The six snippets to make first
| Trigger | Expands to | Why |
|---|---|---|
| "sign off" | Your name, title, phone number | Every email you send outside your organisation |
| "our address" | The full postal address | Slow to say, easy to mistype, used constantly |
| "booking link" | The scheduling URL plus a sentence of framing | URLs are terrible to dictate |
| "the rates paragraph" | The standard pricing explanation | The thing you retype twice a week |
| "my context" | Standing context for AI prompts | Role, jurisdiction, house style, things to avoid |
| "chase one" | The polite first follow-up | Consistency matters more than originality here |
None of those is clever. All of them are things you have typed more than fifty times, which is exactly the qualification.
Choosing trigger phrases
This is where snippets go wrong. A trigger that occurs in ordinary speech will fire when you did not want it, mid-sentence, and the result is baffling.
A good trigger
- Is two or three words, not one.
- Is something you would not say in normal prose.
- Uses a possessive or a definite article: "our address", "the rates paragraph".
- Is easy to say and hard to mishear.
- Is not the first line of the text it expands to.
Setting them up
- Spend a week noticing what you retype Do not try to design the list in advance. The real answer is in your sent folder, and it is boring and specific.
- Write each block out properly, once This is the only time you will write it. Get the wording right — it is going out under your name for the next two years.
- Pick a trigger by the rules above Two or three words, never said by accident.
- Test it mid-sentence Dictate a sentence with the trigger in the middle, not at the start. That is how it will actually be used.
- Add multi-line blocks carefully Check the line breaks land correctly in the app you use most. Chat apps and email clients treat line breaks differently.
Snippets and vocabulary are different things
They get confused constantly, so:
| Vocabulary | Snippets | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Get one word spelt right | Produce a block of text |
| Input | A name the model mishears | A trigger phrase you chose |
| Output | The same word, correctly spelt | Something much longer than you said |
| Example | "Siobhán" instead of "sioban" | "sign off" → three lines of signature |
You want both, and they solve different problems. Vocabulary is at building a dictation vocabulary.
Snippets people actually keep
- The three-paragraph explanation of your process. Sent to every new enquiry, retyped badly every time.
- Standing context for AI prompts. The single highest-leverage snippet for anyone using AI daily.
- Your PR or commit template. Developers, see dictation for developers.
- The "unfortunately we can't" paragraph. Worth wording carefully once, rather than badly under time pressure.
- Standard disclaimers. Professional advice caveats, confidentiality notices.
- Directions to the office. Astonishingly common, astonishingly annoying to type.
Questions
How is this different from macOS text replacement?
macOS text replacement substitutes typed strings and works system-wide, which is genuinely useful. It does not fire from speech, so mid-dictation you would have to stop, type the abbreviation and resume. A voice snippet stays inside the flow of speaking.
Can a snippet include line breaks?
Yes, which is how a signature block works. Test it in the app you use most — email clients, chat apps and rich-text editors handle line breaks differently and one of them will surprise you.
What happens if I say a trigger by accident?
The block appears mid-sentence, which is why trigger choice matters. Pick two or three words that describe the action rather than words that appear in ordinary prose.
How many snippets is too many?
The practical limit is how many triggers you can remember, which is around ten for most people. A snippet you cannot recall is worse than no snippet, because you go looking for it.
Where are snippets stored?
In VV, on your Mac with the rest of your settings. They are not synced to a server and not shared between machines — which means they are private, and also means you set them up again on a new Mac.