Idiolect

Teach Claude Code your words.

Voice dictation mishears anything unusual: product names, jargon, non-English words. There is no setting to fix it. This adds one.

Install

1. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add GiorgiTarsaidze/idiolect
/plugin install idiolect

2. Point voice at the relay, then restart Claude Code:

/idiolect:setup

3. Check it took:

/idiolect:status

_{Needs Node 20+ and Claude Code voice dictation (which needs a Claude.ai account).}

Use

/idiolect:add Flurbix

Say it. Usually that is all it takes, because the recogniser is told to expect the word.

If it still comes out wrong, teach it what was heard:

/idiolect:fix Flurbix

It shows you the last transcript, you point at the wrong part, and it stays fixed in every project, with no restart.

Commands

How it works

Claude never hears your voice. Audio goes to a speech to text service, and only the text it returns reaches Claude. So when a word comes out wrong, Claude has no idea; it just sees the wrong word.

Idiolect sits in that path, on your machine, and does two things:

flowchart LR
    You([you speak]) --> I[idiolect]
    I -->|"layer 1: hints<br/>expect these words"| S[speech to text]
    S -->|"text"| I
    I -->|"layer 2: corrections<br/>swap known mistakes"| P([prompt box])

Layer 1, hints (/idiolect:add) is a nudge before you speak. Usually enough on its own. Still a guess, because the recogniser reads your spelling using English rules.

Layer 2, corrections (/idiolect:fix) is a straight swap after the text comes back. No guessing, so it always works.

Your audio is passed straight through and never inspected.

Your words

One file, shared by every project: ~/.claude/idiolect/vocab.json

{
  "terms": [{
    "word":  "ზამთარი",
    "hints": ["Zamtari"],
    "heard": ["some tarry"]
  }]
}

Where everything lives

The relay

A small WebSocket server on ws://127.0.0.1:8787. Your Claude session starts it automatically. It is never stopped automatically, because one relay serves every open session, so closing one window must not kill dictation in the others.

If something else is already using the port, Idiolect refuses to start rather than assume the port is its own. Change the port below.

Configuration

Set them in ~/.claude/settings.json so Claude Code and the relay agree:

{
  "env": {
    "IDIOLECT_PORT": "9123",
    "VOICE_STREAM_BASE_URL": "ws://127.0.0.1:9123"
  }
}

Both lines must point at the same port. /idiolect:setup writes the second one for you using whatever IDIOLECT_PORT is set to. Restart Claude Code afterwards, since these are read at startup.

Privacy

• Runs entirely on your machine. Binds to 127.0.0.1 only.
• Keeps your last 5 transcripts so fix can show you what was heard. Mode 0600. Delete any time with node bin/idiolect.js purge.
• Never stores audio.

Limits

• Works by redirecting an undocumented internal setting in Claude Code. Verified on 2.1.231 to 2.1.233. A future release could break it.
• Hints cap at 1024 bytes total, roughly 50 long words. Corrections are unlimited.
• Hints only work for English dictation. Corrections work regardless.
• Inherits voice dictation's limits: no SSH sessions, no Claude Code on the web, disabled under HIPAA configuration.

Design rule

Never break dictation. If the vocabulary is broken, the connection fails, or a correction throws, audio passes through untouched. A missed correction is annoying. A dead microphone is an uninstall.

Development

npm test

No dependencies to install. ws is vendored in vendor/.

License

MIT