Captures

Overview

A capture is an audio clip paired with its transcript. The Captures tab is where every dictation, manual recording, and uploaded audio file lands, with the original audio kept alongside the text so you can replay, re-run transcription with a different model, refine the transcript, or send the content somewhere else — including generating it back as speech in any of your voice profiles.

Where captures come from

All three paths share the same backend pipeline, the same model picker, and the same refinement flags. The source badge is there so you can visually scan a long list.

List view

The main Captures view is a chronological list. Each row shows:

• The transcript (raw or refined — the refined version wins if present)
• Duration + timestamp
• Source badge
• A play button for the original audio
• A meatballs menu with per-row actions

Filtering and search are a Tier-2 ask — ping if you need them.

Detail view

Clicking into a capture opens the detail view:

• Waveform player for the original audio
• Transcript editor — click in and edit. Changes save on blur.
• Refined vs. raw toggle if refinement ran on this capture
• Per-capture action bar — retranscribe, refine, play as voice, delete
• Settings snapshot — STT model used, refinement flags at the time this capture was processed, and the voice model if any was played

Retranscribe

Runs the capture's original audio through a different Whisper model without re-uploading or re-refining anything. Useful when:

• The default model mis-heard something and you want to try a larger model
• You used Base for a noisy clip and want to rerun with Turbo
• A non-English clip needs an explicit language hint

Settings → Captures → Transcription controls the default model and language lock for new captures. Retranscribe uses those defaults unless you override them per capture.

Refine

Runs the raw transcript through the local LLM to produce a cleaned-up version. The flags on the capture are snapshotted when refinement first runs, so you can re-refine later with different flags without losing the raw transcript:

See the Refinement section of Dictation for how Sonna strips Whisper loop hallucinations before the LLM sees the transcript — a capture can be re-refined any number of times without re-introducing "thanks for watching thanks for watching" echoes.

The refinement model picker (three bundled Qwen3 sizes) lives in Settings → Captures → Refinement.

Play as voice

This is the capability no one else in the dictation category ships: take any capture and play it back as speech in any of your voice profiles. One dropdown over every profile, one click, and the capture's text runs through /generate with the selected voice.

Use cases:

• Hear your own dictation back in a cloned voice of someone you like
• Send a message you dictated as an audio reply in a specific character
• Quickly prototype a line for a story without retyping

Playback uses whatever engine the selected profile is bound to — the same rules as the Generate tab. There's no LLM in this path; the transcript goes through unchanged. If you want the agent-style "transform the content before speaking" flow, that's what the personality modes do — and the same primitive is exposed to MCP-aware agents via the MCP Server so Claude Code, Cursor, or Cline can speak in one of your voices on their own.

Send-to menu

Each capture has a Send-to menu for moving its content into other parts of Sonna:

• Copy transcript — to clipboard
• Use as voice sample… — promote this capture to a sample on a voice profile of your choice. Opens a profile picker (with "+ New voice" for cold starts) and a reference-text confirm dialog, because cloning needs the reference_text to match the audio verbatim. Edit as needed and save — the capture stays in the Captures tab untouched; the sample is a copy, not a move.

Storage

The original audio is kept alongside the transcript in your Sonna data directory. Settings → Captures → Storage shows the captures folder and can open it directly in your file manager.

Every capture's audio file and metadata row can be re-processed (retranscribe, refine, Play-as) as long as the audio file still exists.

Short-recording guard

Audio clips under 300 ms are short-circuited client-side and never uploaded. This prevents a fumbled chord tap from landing an empty capture. The threshold is tuned to filter accidents without cutting off intentional short dictations.

Keyboard shortcuts

Inside the Captures tab:

API surface

The Captures tab is backed by a small set of REST endpoints:

These endpoints are stable and usable from your own scripts — see Remote Mode for running Sonna as a server the rest of your machine can talk to.

Next steps