Empty, wrong, or slow transcription

If the transcription is empty

• Did the waveform move while you were talking? If not, the audio was silent. Check microphone settings.
• Did you talk for less than 0.5 seconds? Dimmy's anti-hallucination guard skips clips that short.
• Is the system mic muted? Some laptops have a hardware mute switch on F4 or similar.

If the transcription is in the wrong language

• Open Settings → General → Language. If it's set to Auto-detect, switch to your specific language. Auto-detect needs at least 30 seconds of clear audio to get short utterances right.
• If you mix languages in one clip, the most-spoken language wins. Speak more of the target language to bias detection.
• If you mostly dictate Italian, set Language = Italian. Same for English. Auto is best when you really alternate.

If the transcription is inaccurate

• Upgrade the Whisper model. base-q8_0 is the default; large-v3-turbo-q8_0 catches finer nuance. See Choose a Whisper model.
• Switch to a cloud provider for one-off accurate transcription. See Cloud providers compared.
• Reduce background noise. Air conditioners, fans, and street noise hurt accuracy more than mic quality.
• Speak closer to the microphone. 15 to 30 cm is the sweet spot for most laptop mics.

If the transcription is slow

• On-device: pick a smaller model, or switch to a cloud provider (Groq is sub-second on most clips).
• Check GPU acceleration is on (Settings → Models → Show acceleration). If your GPU is listed but not active, restart Dimmy.
• On a battery-saving Windows laptop, plug it in. Some integrated GPUs throttle aggressively on battery.