Hello Blabby Support Team, I have been using Blabby for several months, but I am experiencing some persistent problems with the Custom Modes. No Rwhich prompt I use, Blabby does not reliably follow my instructions. I am dictating in German, and one of my requirements is that the letter “ß” must never be used. Instead, it should always be replaced with “ss”. Unfortunately, Blabby continues to use “ß” even when I explicitly state this rule several times in the prompt. There is also a problem with German umlauts. Blabby sometimes does not produce “ä”, “ö” and “ü” correctly and instead outputs combinations such as “ae”, “oe” or “ue” (or sometimes just the corresponding letters without the umlaut). Another problem is emojis. I explicitly instruct the Custom Mode to add appropriate emojis to my messages, but it usually does not add any emojis at all. In addition, every few messages Blabby suddenly stops applying proper punctuation and capitalization. The resulting text can then contain missing punctuation as well as incorrect upper- and lower-case letters. This is particularly frustrating because the Custom Mode is supposed to apply the instructions to the transcribed text. Could you please explain where the problem might be? Is this a limitation of the speech-to-text model, the selected AI model for the Custom Mode, or is there currently a technical problem with Custom Modes? I would also like to know which AI model you recommend for German dictation with reliable spelling corrections, umlauts, punctuation, capitalization and custom formatting rules. I would be happy to provide example recordings, transcripts or screenshots if that would help your development team reproduce the problem. Thank you for your help. Best regards,
For the “ß” → “ss” issue, you actually don’t need to rely on a Custom Mode for this. In the Windows app, go to Settings → Snippets → Add Snippet.
In the first field, “When I say”, enter:
ß
Then in the “Replace with” field, enter:
ss
Blabby will then automatically replace “ß” with “ss”, regardless of which mode or AI model you are using.
Regarding the other German formatting issues, I would recommend trying GPT-5.4 or GPT-5.6. GPT-OSS 120B is currently our fastest model, but it is much stronger in English, so I would not recommend it for German.
GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.6 are larger and generally better at following instructions, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and languages such as German, although they can be a little slower. I would suggest trying both and seeing which works best for your prompts.
One limitation with Custom Modes is that the final result still depends on the AI model following the prompt correctly. AI providers sometimes update their models, so a prompt that worked very reliably before can occasionally behave differently after an update. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that an AI model will follow every instruction 100% of the time.
For rules that need to be completely consistent, such as always replacing “ß” with “ss”, Snippets are the better solution.
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Comments1
BlabbyAI Dev
Sep 22
Hi,
Thanks for the detailed feedback.
For the “ß” → “ss” issue, you actually don’t need to rely on a Custom Mode for this. In the Windows app, go to Settings → Snippets → Add Snippet.
In the first field, “When I say”, enter:
ß
Then in the “Replace with” field, enter:
ss
Blabby will then automatically replace “ß” with “ss”, regardless of which mode or AI model you are using.
Regarding the other German formatting issues, I would recommend trying GPT-5.4 or GPT-5.6. GPT-OSS 120B is currently our fastest model, but it is much stronger in English, so I would not recommend it for German.
GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.6 are larger and generally better at following instructions, spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and languages such as German, although they can be a little slower. I would suggest trying both and seeing which works best for your prompts.
One limitation with Custom Modes is that the final result still depends on the AI model following the prompt correctly. AI providers sometimes update their models, so a prompt that worked very reliably before can occasionally behave differently after an update. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that an AI model will follow every instruction 100% of the time.
For rules that need to be completely consistent, such as always replacing “ß” with “ss”, Snippets are the better solution.