Frequently Asked Questions

Shuovo is AI dictation that doesn't cut off when you pause to think. Tap once to start, speak for as long as you need — pause, think, continue — then tap once to stop. It's built for long prompts, notes, drafts, mixed-language dictation, and voice memos, and it works across your apps through the keyboard. Audio saves as you speak, so nothing is lost.

“Shuo” comes from 说 — shuō, the Mandarin word for “to speak,” and “vo” comes from 我 — wǒ, meaning “me.” Read together as 说我, the name means “speak my mind” — it reflects Shuovo’s bilingual origins and its purpose: turning spoken thoughts into useful writing.

Shuovo can be pronounced approximately as “shwo-vo.”

Most built-in dictation stops listening after a short pause, which makes it frustrating for anything longer than a sentence. Shuovo has no artificial session timeout — you can pause to gather your thoughts without it cutting you off. Your audio is also saved as you speak, so a long dictation isn't lost if something interrupts you.

Those tools are for when you already know what you want to say and want it typed faster. Shuovo is for when you don't yet: you talk for a few minutes, sometimes twenty, open other apps to check things while you talk, change your mind, and get one clean draft at the end.

If most of what you dictate is a sentence or two, a hotkey dictation tool will feel faster, and Shuovo is not trying to beat it at that. If you regularly have a thought that takes a few minutes and a few pauses to get out — or a thought that switches between Chinese and English halfway through — that is what Shuovo is built for. Shuovo is available on Android and as a Chrome extension; it is not a Mac desktop app.

There is no cap. In five weeks of the founder’s own use — 509 sessions — most ran under a minute, one in three ran past a minute (those averaged close to three), and the longest ran 19 minutes; that is the range Shuovo is tested in daily. Sessions of an hour or more work — the recording is saved as you speak and uploaded in pieces — but we have not tested that range as thoroughly, and we would rather say so than claim it. Either way the audio is kept on your device and can be retried or exported, so a long recording is never lost to a failed transcription.

Shuovo is available on Android — you can get it on Google Play — and as a Chrome extension for desktop browsers, available in the Chrome Web Store. Both are free to install, and one voice-typing subscription covers both. An iOS version is in the works and isn't available yet.

Shuovo uses passwordless sign-in. Enter your email and we'll send you a one-click magic link — no password to remember. The link expires after 15 minutes for security.

The Shuovo app is free to download, and typing — including bilingual pinyin and tone-learning input — is free forever. Voice typing requires a Shuovo account and starts with a 14-day free trial; after that it's $15 / month, or you can save 20% with a yearly plan. There's no artificial session timeout on any plan, and you can cancel anytime.

No. The 14-day trial is free. If you cancel before the trial ends, you won't be charged.

Open your account page, sign in, and cancel from there. Your subscription stays active until the end of the current billing period, and you won't be charged again after that.

Payments are processed securely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details.

Shuovo is built and tested for English and Chinese, including both in the same sentence with no language toggle. Other languages run through the same speech engine and generally work, but they are not tuned or tested the way English and Chinese are, and we don't claim they are. If you work in another language, try the demo on the homepage with it first.

Yes. Shuovo works as a keyboard, so you can dictate into messaging apps, notes, email, AI chat prompts, documents — anywhere you can type.

It is kept. When a transcription doesn’t land — the connection dropped, the tab closed, the sign-in expired — the audio stays on your device instead of being discarded with the error message. In Chrome, the Shuovo toolbar icon shows a count: click it to transcribe the recording again, or delete it. On Android, past recordings live in the app, where you can review, retry, copy or export them.

By default, speech-to-text runs on ElevenLabs Scribe — in our testing the most accurate model for Chinese, code-switching, and accented English. If you add your own Groq API key, it runs on OpenAI's Whisper Large v3 served through Groq instead. The raw transcription is then passed through Shuovo's own editing engine, which removes filler words, applies your spoken self-corrections, and fixes punctuation, grammar, and names in one pass — so what lands in your text field is clean, ready-to-use text instead of a raw transcript.

BYOK is optional and exists for privacy. Without a key, your audio is transcribed by ElevenLabs on our account and discarded after transcription (we have opted our account out of model training). If you would rather your audio never pass through a provider we contract, attach a free Groq API key from your personal Groq account on the account page: transcription then runs on your own Groq account, effectively opting you out of our processing. The key is encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM, used solely to send your transcription requests to Groq on your behalf, and you can remove it at any time.

With an active subscription, cloud sync keeps your learned words, snippets, and settings available across your devices. Without sync, that data stays local to each device.

Audio is sent to our server solely for speech-to-text transcription and is discarded from our servers immediately after transcription is complete. We never use your recordings for anything else. On your device, only the most recent recording is kept by default. See our Privacy Policy for full details.

No. We never collect, access, or transmit your raw keystrokes, the contents of the fields you type into, or your clipboard. Cloud sync only uploads your learned-word list, your saved snippets, and your settings — not a record of everything you type.

No. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information for marketing, and we do not use your data to train AI models.

You can delete your account at any time from shuovo.com/delete-account. We remove your account data and usage logs within 30 days.