Say it
Out loud, the way you'd say it to someone. There's no dictation voice to put on.
Talk the way you actually talk. What comes back is clean Fidel with the spelling and punctuation sorted out, and not one word swapped for a word you didn't say.
Two hundred and some characters, on a phone keyboard that makes you hunt for the right vowel form every single time. Most people give up halfway and switch to English. Speaking it is just faster.
Out loud, the way you'd say it to someone. There's no dictation voice to put on.
Check the names and the numbers. That's where recognizers slip.
Copy it, or drop it straight into whatever you were already typing in.
Spelling and punctuation get fixed. That is the entire edit. The text you get back is rebuilt out of the words you actually said, so there's no room for the software to reword you, shorten you, or take a guess at what you probably meant. ቃል በቃል means word for word. It's a constraint in the code, not a slogan.
On a Mac it's ⌥ Space, and the words land at your cursor in whatever app happens to be open. On Telegram you send a voice note and Fidel comes back. Phone keyboards are next.
No recognizer does, not on the first try. So add the words you actually use: people, neighborhoods, whatever keeps coming out wrong at work. They get handed to the recognizer as context before it listens, which makes a real difference without being a guarantee.
None of this needs a quiet room or a good microphone. It's just what helps any recognizer hear you, ours included.
Full sentences beat single words. Whispering makes it worse and so does shouting. Just talk like there's someone in the room.
Wind and music are the worst offenders. Silence isn't the goal. Being the loudest thing in the room is.
Overlapping speakers come back scrambled. If the note actually matters, let people finish.
Names, dates, addresses, amounts. That's where the mistakes hide. If the same word fails twice, put it in your dictionary.
This one matters more than it sounds. Your first few words set the language for the whole note. Start in English and your Amharic can come back romanized. Start in Amharic and the English still lands fine.
Short breaks are where punctuation comes from. They also give you a clean place to change languages if you need to.
Not a market segment. The people who switch to English on their phone because Fidel takes too long, and would rather not have to.
The long ones you keep meaning to send and don't, because typing them properly takes twenty minutes.
Notes and first drafts, in the language you were already thinking in.
Announcements and minutes that have to go out in Amharic, and only in Amharic.
Elders who never learned a Fidel keyboard. Anyone whose hands make typing hard. Here speech is the whole interface.
It goes up, it gets transcribed, it comes back. Nothing is sold and there is no analytics profile trailing you around. If you ever want to donate clips to make Amharic recognition better, that is a switch you have to go and turn on yourself.