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.

Two ways to do it. Anthropic's Claude is the paid option and, in our view, the best at it. Groq is the free one: a genuine no-cost tier that is more than enough for tidying dictation, and it does not train on what you send. If you want Vito to cost nothing at all, pair Groq's free cleanup with AssemblyAI's free starting credit.

Before you start

A few things worth knowing, whichever provider you pick:

• You can start without paying anything. AssemblyAI gives new accounts free starting credit and Groq has a free tier — neither asks for a card or a balance to begin, so pairing those two gets you dictating for nothing. Soniox and Anthropic are the paid options.
• The paid ones are prepaid. Soniox and Anthropic need a balance before they 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.
• If you add a card, 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 free tiers can't run up a bill, so there's nothing to cap while you stay on them.)
• The key is a password. Whoever holds it spends your money — or uses your free allowance. Each guide covers looking after it properly.