Setting up your API key

Vito is free, and it has no account. What it does have is a place for your own key, so the AI services do their work for you directly and bill you at their price — with nobody in between taking a cut.

You need two keys, because two different things happen to what you say. One service listens and produces words. The other reads those words and turns them into text worth sending: hesitations gone, sentences mended, line breaks where you asked for them.

The listening half

Pick one of these. They do the same job, and the trade between them is worth ten seconds of your attention:

• AssemblyAI is the easier start. They advertise $50 in free credits on signup with no credit card required, so you can have Vito working before you hand over a payment detail.
• Soniox is the cheaper run. They list $0.10–0.12 per hour against AssemblyAI's $0.15–0.45, which is why it is the one we recommend and what the €0.15-per-hour figure is based on.

Neither choice is permanent. Swapping later is a matter of pasting a different key, so starting on the free credit and moving to the cheaper option once you know you will keep using it is a perfectly sensible order.

The tidying half

This one is not optional if you want dictation that reads like writing. Without it you get an accurate transcript of someone talking, which is not the same thing as text.

Before you start

Three things worth knowing, whichever provider you pick:

• They are prepaid. Every one of these needs a balance before it will do anything. A few euros is a lot of dictation, but zero is zero, and an empty account reports itself as a confusing error rather than an empty account.
• Set a spending limit while you are in there. It takes a minute and it is the only thing standing between a mistake and your balance.
• The key is a password. Whoever holds it spends your money. Each guide covers looking after it properly.