Wrong the same way
every single time?

Two boxes, and one that does the clever part

The Replacements screen is a grid with four columns: Heard, Replace with, Only after, and a Category so a long list stays navigable.

“Only after” is the one most tools don’t have

Most words that come out wrong are only wrong in one place. Dictate about a browser and cache arrives as cash every time — but cash is a perfectly good word you use in its own right, and a blind swap would turn “I received $100 in cash” into something you would have to go back and fix. One rule gets you the wrong trade either way.

Rules match whole words, never parts of them, so one for cash can never turn up inside cashier. Partial matching would be a mess.

Naming the words it has to follow solves it. Write one rule for cash → cache after “clear the” and another for cash → cache after “the browser”. One Heard word, one Replace with, two contexts, two rows — and every other sentence with cash in it is left exactly as you said it. Add a row for each phrase that should trigger it; nothing else does.

Shorthand: a word you can say, for one you can’t

The same mechanism works in the other direction. If a word is long, awkward or just keeps coming out wrong, map something short and unmistakable to it. Say snuffy, get Snuffleupagus. Say our standard warranty and get the sentence you always write. It is the fastest way to stop fighting one stubborn word.

Your rules beat the built-in ones

Lickety ships a list of spoken punctuation — “colon”, “open quote”, “backslash” and the rest. Your replacements run before that list, so if you ever need one of those words to behave differently, your rule is the one that wins. Nothing needs restarting; the change applies to the next thing you say.

It travels

The list imports and exports, and it rides along in Lickety’s backup with your vocabulary and settings. Moving to a new PC is a copy, not an afternoon of retyping.

When a replacement is the wrong tool

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the thing that makes most correction dictionaries useless.

A replacement needs a stable wrong answer. It matches text, so there has to be text to match. Dictate a name the recogniser has never heard and you often get a different wrong spelling each time — three goes at Fastenal in one well-known tool produced “Fasten all”, “Fasten all” and “that’s in all”. There is nothing there to write a rule against.

There is a quick test for which tool you need. Say the word three times. The same wrong answer three times is a replacement. Three different wrong answers means there is nothing stable to catch, and it is a vocabulary problem instead.

And when vocabulary has had its go and the word still comes out differently every time, there is a third move. Some words defeat vocabulary because the recogniser is not uncertain at all — it is confidently re-parsing them into ordinary English it already knows. Snuffleupagus breaks into “snuffle”, “up” and “a gus”, every one of them a real word, so the nudge never gets a chance. The answer is to stop fighting it: pick a short word the recogniser never gets wrong, map it to the hard one, and say that instead. An unwinnable recognition problem traded for a trivial one.

That first case belongs to Vocabulary, which works the other way round: the word is taught to the recogniser before it listens, so it knows the word exists and picks it instead of guessing at the sounds. Vocabulary is for words it has never met. Replacements are for words it meets and gets wrong the same way every time, and for the shorthand trick when neither works. Most people end up using both, and they are two screens apart.

What is the difference between Vocabulary and Replacements?

Vocabulary is taught to the recogniser before it listens, so it picks the right word instead of guessing at the sounds. A replacement runs afterwards, on the text, and swaps one thing for another. Vocabulary is the first thing to reach for on a name it has never heard; a replacement is for a word it hears wrong the same way every time.

What if the wrong answer is different every time?

Then a replacement cannot help, and neither can a correction dictionary in any other tool — there is nothing stable to match. That is the case Vocabulary exists for, and it is why an unstable wrong answer is the real problem with tools that only offer replacements.

Will a rule fire inside a longer word?

No. Replacements match whole words only, never parts of them, so a rule for “cash” leaves “cashier” alone.

How do I stop a rule firing where I don’t want it?

Use the Only after column. A rule for “cash” that fires only after “clear the” turns “clear the cash” into “clear the cache” and leaves “$100 in cash” alone. Each phrase that should trigger it gets its own row, so you decide exactly where the rule applies.

Do I have to restart after adding one?

No. The rule applies to your next dictation. Replacements run before spoken punctuation, so a rule of yours always beats a built-in one.

Can I move my list to another PC?

Yes. The list imports and exports, and it is included in Lickety’s backup along with your vocabulary and settings.