InkSpoke for students

For students who would rather talk than type — capturing lecture notes, drafting essays, and studying by voice, without spending a cent on cloud usage.

Profile

You juggle readings, lectures, and deadlines across a laptop and a phone. You think faster than you type, your notes pile up in half a dozen apps, and your budget is tight. You want to:

• Capture ideas quickly — in a lecture, walking between classes, or at 2 a.m. before a deadline.
• Turn messy spoken thoughts into clean writing — essay paragraphs, discussion posts, emails to a professor.
• Keep it free and private — no per-word cloud bills, and lecture recordings that stay on your own machine.

InkSpoke is built for exactly this. Speech recognition runs on your device by default, so it's free, works offline (great for spotty campus Wi-Fi), and your audio never has to leave your laptop.

What you'll get from InkSpoke

• Notes and drafts at the speed of speech. Hold a hotkey, talk, and clean text lands wherever your cursor is — Google Docs, Word, Notion, your email.
• Rambling in, polished prose out. AI refinement strips the "ums," fixes grammar and punctuation, and matches the tone of the app you're writing in.
• Lecture and study-group transcripts. Record a session and get a speaker-labeled transcript you can export to your note app.
• Free and offline. The default speech model runs entirely on-device — no subscription required to dictate.
• Capture on the go. The InkSpoke keyboard on your phone dictates into any app when you're away from your laptop.

Recommended setup

You can start with the defaults and change nothing. Here's the student-friendly configuration:

Setting	Recommended	Why
Speech model	Whisper Small (on-device)	The free default — fully offline and private, runs on your own machine.
AI Refinement	On (the default)	Turns spoken rambling into readable prose. Toggle it any time.
Dictation Mode	Standard (the default)	Most accurate — transcribes in one pass after you stop speaking.
Workspace	An "Academic" workspace	Auto-applies your course vocabulary and a writing style to every dictation.
Personal dictionary	On (the default)	Deterministically fixes recurring terms (e.g. spoken "mla" → "MLA").
Quiet speech mode	On when you're in the library	Detects soft, low-volume speech so you can dictate under your breath.

For AI refinement, the built-in InkSpoke Platform text model works out of the box. If you want to stay completely free and offline, you can pick an on-device text model instead — see Models and providers and On-device vs. cloud.

Default hotkeys you'll use constantly:

Action	Windows / Linux	macOS
Start / stop dictation	Alt + Space	⌥ + Space
Command Mode (transform selected text)	Alt + Shift + C	⌥ + ⇧ + C
Toggle AI Refinement	Alt + Shift + R	⌥ + ⇧ + R

Build your "Academic" workspace with the wizard

Settings → Workspaces → create a workspace opens a guided wizard. Pick a Purpose (e.g. Documentation for essays, or Meeting Notes for lectures) and a Domain (Academic Research or Education). InkSpoke seeds a matching tone, output style, and starter vocabulary for you, and names the workspace automatically. See Create and tune a workspace.

Essential features

1. Push-to-talk dictation — the core loop. Press the hotkey, speak, press again, and the text is injected where your cursor is.
2. AI refinement — cleans filler and grammar and adapts the tone to the app you're in (casual in chat, precise in a document).
3. Workspaces — teach InkSpoke your subject's vocabulary and preferred style, applied automatically based on the app you're typing into.
4. Command Mode — select any text you've already written and speak an instruction like "make this more formal" or "fix the grammar" to rewrite it in place.
5. Meeting & lecture recording — capture a lecture or study group and get a speaker-labeled transcript. Runs fully on-device.
6. The mobile keyboard — dictate into any app on your phone (iOS and Android) so you can capture ideas away from your desk.

Also worth setting up early: a personal dictionary and personal context for the terms, names, and acronyms that come up in your courses.

Example workflows

1. Draft an essay paragraph by voice

1. Open your document (Google Docs, Word, Notion) and click where you want to write.
2. Press Alt + Space (⌥ + Space on macOS). The listening overlay appears.
3. Talk through your point naturally — don't worry about filler words or false starts.
4. Press the hotkey again (or click Send). InkSpoke transcribes on-device, refines the text, and drops the polished paragraph in at your cursor.
5. Want it more formal? Select the paragraph, press Alt + Shift + C, and say "make this more academic and concise." Command Mode rewrites the selection in place.

2. Record a lecture and export your notes

1. From the system-tray menu, choose Start Meeting Recording. In the overlay, pick your Academic workspace and language, then Start Meeting.
2. For an in-person lecture, InkSpoke records your microphone. For an online lecture (Zoom, Teams, a web stream), it also captures the other participants' system audio, so both sides are transcribed.
3. When it's over, click Stop (in the HUD or the tray). Transcription and speaker labeling run on your device.
4. In the Transcript Viewer, rename the speakers (e.g. "Professor Lee") — every one of their segments updates at once.
5. Export as Markdown or VTT (or copy to the clipboard) and paste into your note app. See Speakers and the transcript viewer.

A couple of setup notes

Meetings transcribe on-device (Local) — cloud meeting transcription is coming soon. If you want to replay the audio later, turn on Keep recorded audio in Settings → Recordings & Meetings before you record (it's off by default). On macOS, capturing an online lecture's audio needs the Screen Recording permission; without it, meetings record your microphone only.

If your professor shares a recording as a file, use Transcribe a File… from the tray instead — it accepts common audio and video formats and can even use a cloud model for the transcription. See Transcribe a file.

3. Capture an idea on your phone

1. In any app on your phone, switch to the InkSpoke keyboard.
2. Tap to dictate, speak your thought, and the text is inserted into the app you're in.
3. Back at your laptop, keep drafting. See Work across desktop and mobile.

note

On iOS, tapping to start hands off to the main app to capture your speech, then returns the text to the keyboard. It's a quick round trip — see The InkSpoke keyboard.

Pro tips

• Dictate quietly in the library. Turn on Whisper "quiet speech" mode (Settings → Audio) — it lowers the speech-detection threshold and boosts gain so InkSpoke hears you even when you're murmuring under your breath.
• Feed your readings into a workspace. Workspace knowledge entries can be pulled from a file, including PDFs — add a key reading or your course glossary as Domain Context so refinement knows your topic's terminology. See Create and tune a workspace.
• Add course acronyms to your personal dictionary. Whole-word substitutions apply before refinement, so spoken "apa" reliably becomes "APA," "mla" becomes "MLA," and so on.
• Toggle refinement off for exact quotes. Press Alt + Shift + R to inject your words verbatim when you're transcribing a quote or a formula and don't want anything "cleaned up."
• Studying in another language? InkSpoke auto-detects your dictation language, and you can pick one from the overlay. If English is your second language, the guide for non-native English speakers has more. See also Dictation modes and languages.

Next steps

• Install and set up InkSpoke — download and get running.
• Your first dictation — send your first words in about five minutes.
• Build a workspace for your domain — a step-by-step for your Academic workspace.
• Transcribe a meeting — the full lecture-recording walkthrough.