She Dictates Her Fantasy Novels, Invented Names and All. Here's the Setup.

Say a made-up name into most dictation apps and watch it fall apart. Your hero, Kaelthyr, lands on the page as “kale thigh.” Your port city, Vaelport, turns into “vale port.” The magic system you spent a year building gets autocorrected into breakfast foods.

One of our users writes fantasy for a living, and she dictates it anyway. Invented names, invented places, invented words, all of it. She shared her setup with us and asked us not to use her name. Four features carry it: the Dictionary, Memory, and Smart Formatting keep the words right — the three most apps treat as an afterthought — plus Hands-Free Mode, which lets her talk for an hour without touching the keyboard. I changed the identifying details, and she read this page before it went up.

She writes fantasy and speculative fiction. Self-published, a series measured in books, not blog posts. She works on a Mac and drafts out loud, because her first drafts come faster when she talks them than when she types them. She paces while she does it, gestures, acts the dialogue out — hands nowhere near the keyboard.

A morning session is a scene. Dialogue, action, one character turning to another and saying something. All of it packed with names and words that live only in her head.

That's the hard part for any dictation app. Ordinary English is easy; a good model handles it. The invented layer is what breaks:

• A cast of character names no dictionary has ever seen.
• A map of invented places.
• A vocabulary of spells, orders, and titles she made up herself.

Get those wrong on every line and dictation stops saving time. You spend the afternoon cleaning up the morning.

One note on sourcing: everything I say about her, she told us. Every price and feature comes from Voibe's own pages, so you can check it.

Whether you can dictate invented fiction at all comes down to one thing: what the app does with a word it has never heard.

Most apps that sell “custom vocabulary” run find-and-replace. They transcribe your audio into plain text first, then swap words against a table. You say Kaelthyr; the model writes its best phonetic guess, “kale thigh.” The table hunts for “Kaelthyr,” finds nothing to match, and leaves the mistake sitting there. You can pile in every spelling variant you can dream up and still lose, because you're guessing at the model's mistakes before it makes them.

Voibe's Dictionary flips the order. It hands your terms to the transcription itself, so the app spells the name right as it writes it instead of patching it afterward. Add Kaelthyr, Vaelport, and aetherforge once, and they land the way you invented them.

That's a real dictionary, not a search-and-replace list. One teaches the model a word; the other mops up after it. You can also paste a list in bulk, including a Dragon Vocabulary Center export. The roundup for writers compares the tools that get this right.

The Dictionary does the names. It's the one that matters most, and it's why she can dictate a whole chapter without a second pass just to fix spelling.

Hands-Free Mode is how she talks for an hour without her hands. Push-to-talk means holding the Fn key the whole time you speak — fine for a line in Slack, miserable for a two-page scene. Hands-Free Mode drops the key: double-tap to start, double-tap to stop, and talk as long as you want in between. She leans back, closes her eyes, paces the room, acts the dialogue out. Nothing to hold, nothing to press mid-sentence. For someone who drafts by performing a scene, that's the difference between dictating and fighting the keyboard.

Memory handles the parts she repeats. You say a short trigger out loud and it expands into a block of preset text. For her, that's a character's full title, an incantation the plot keeps returning to, a house motto, a chunk of world-building she restates across scenes. Type it once, speak it forever after. Office workers use the same trick for a signature or an address; fiction just has stranger boilerplate. Her one tip: pick triggers you'd never say by accident, or a normal sentence will set one off.

Smart Formatting was the one she didn't trust — until it did less than she feared. It tidies up as you go: strips fillers, adds punctuation and capitals, breaks paragraphs. It doesn't paraphrase, doesn't change your meaning, doesn't write anything new. Your words stay yours, minus the “um”s. It stays off until you switch it on. For a novelist that limit is the whole point. A rewrite tool would smooth a line she left rough on purpose and change her voice without asking. This one leaves it alone.

The headline numbers are small on purpose:

• Zero voice training. No enrollment, no reading a script to the app. You install it and dictate.
• Zero words rewritten. Smart Formatting formats; it doesn't rewrite. Your prose stays your prose.
• $149, once. A lifetime license for Mac and Windows. For a book that takes years, that beats a subscription. If you'd rather not pay up front, it's $7.50 a month or $59 a year.

Together they buy her one thing: a morning of talking that doesn't cost an afternoon of cleanup. She double-taps into Hands-Free Mode, paces the room, and dictates a whole scene without touching the keyboard. The names come out right. The set pieces drop in from a single word. The fillers are gone and the prose is untouched.

Where It Still Trips Her Up

It isn't friction-free, and she'd say so first:

• The Dictionary needs setting up. A new book means adding the new cast before the first session pays off. It's a dictionary, not a mind reader — a name it hasn't met yet still comes out phonetic the first time.
• Memory triggers can backfire. Pick a trigger you'd use in a normal sentence and it fires when you don't want it. Choose distinctive ones.
• Smart Formatting won't punch up your writing. If you want an app to tighten your sentences, this isn't it. That's a rewriter's job, and Voibe doesn't do it on purpose.
• Full on-device mode is Apple Silicon only. On Intel Macs and Windows, your audio runs through Voibe's zero-retention cloud instead. She's on an Apple Silicon Mac, so hers stays on the machine. Yours depends on your setup.

You write in an invented world. The Dictionary is the whole game — load your names first, then dictate. Dictation tips for writers covers the habits that keep a dictated draft usable, and the roundup for authors compares the tools for long-form work.

You're coming from typing or Apple Dictation. The switch is small, and there's no voice training to sit through. Getting started with Voibe walks the install, the mode, and your first Dictionary entries.

Your “invented vocabulary” is really citations and jargon. A thesis, not a trilogy. Same Dictionary, different desk — dictation apps for academic writing is that version.

Voibe is $149 once for Mac and Windows, with a 7-day trial and a 30-day refund window, and it runs fully on-device on an Apple Silicon Mac. If you draft fiction by voice, it's worth a week of your own words.

This is a real Voibe user, a working fiction author, who shared her setup and agreed to tell it anonymously. I changed or dropped anything that could identify her; the shape of her work — fantasy, self-published, drafted by voice on a Mac — is real. She read this page and signed off on every fact I put in her mouth before it went live. The prices and product details come from Voibe's own pages, not her account, so you can check them.

None of this came from what she dictated. I never read her transcripts or her manuscript, and the app couldn't have handed them over if I'd asked:

• In on-device mode on an Apple Silicon Mac, her audio never leaves the machine.
• In cloud mode, audio is encrypted in transit, transcribed, then deleted the second it's done. Never stored, never sold, never used to train a model.

Voibe keeps no record of what any one person writes. And the names in this piece — Kaelthyr, Vaelport, aetherforge — are mine, invented for the page, not hers.

She still writes the books. Voibe just stays out of the way while she says them out loud: names spelled right, set pieces a word away, fillers gone and not one sentence rephrased. If you draft fiction by voice, start with the writers' roundup and load your cast into the Dictionary before your first session.