Getting an Anthropic API key
Anthropic's Claude is what makes dictated text read like written text. Speech recognition gives you the words; Claude removes the hesitations, mends the sentences, adds the line breaks and turns "thumbs up" into 👍. It is the second of the two keys Vito uses.
About five minutes. You will need an email address, a phone number for verification, and a payment method — Anthropic's API runs on prepaid credits, separately from any Claude subscription you might already have.
A Claude subscription is not the same thing
Paying for Claude in the browser or the desktop app does not give you API access, and the credit does not carry across. The API is billed separately, per use, through the Console. If you already pay for Claude, you still need to buy API credits here.
Creating the key
- Sign up at console.anthropic.com. This is the developer console, not the Claude chat app. Expect to verify an email address and a phone number.
- Buy some credits under Billing. Add a payment method and purchase a small amount to start with. Nothing works on a zero balance, and you can always top up later.
- Set a monthly spend limit while you are in there. The Console has limits and usage alerts in its settings. Set them now — this is the one step people skip and the one that actually protects them.
-
Open API keys in the settings and create a key. Name it
something you will recognise, such as
vito. - Copy it immediately. The full key is shown once, when it is created. Afterwards you can see that it exists but not read it back.
- Paste it into Vito. Settings → AI cleanup. Vito checks the key before you depend on it.
Prefer to read it from the source?
Anthropic documents all of this at docs.anthropic.com. Where a screen here doesn't match what you see, theirs is the authority.
What it costs
Claude is billed per amount of text it reads and writes, which for cleaning up dictation is a small amount — the transcript of a spoken paragraph is not much text. It is the cheaper half of the pair: of the roughly €0.15 per hour of speech that Vito costs to run, the cleanup is the smaller share.
Current rates are on Anthropic's pricing page. We don't reprint prices here, because they change and a stale figure quoted on someone else's behalf helps nobody.
Looking after your key
This part is the same whichever provider you picked, and it is worth two minutes. None of it is paperwork: a key that gets out is somebody else spending your money.
Treat it like a password, because that is what it is
Anyone holding your key can make requests that you pay for. Don't paste it into a chat, a forum post, a bug report or a screenshot, and never commit it to a repository — bots scan public code for keys and find them within minutes.
Set a spending limit before you start using it
All three providers let you cap what the account can spend in a month, or warn you at a threshold. This is the most effective protection you have and it takes a minute to set. With a limit in place, a mistake costs you the limit instead of the balance.
Keep a little credit on the account
These are prepaid services. Run the balance to zero and transcription simply stops working — usually with an unhelpful error. Topping up a small amount and setting a low-balance alert saves you diagnosing a problem that isn't one.
Most providers also offer an automatic top-up: when the balance drops below an amount you choose, they charge your card for another fixed amount. Worth switching on. It is the difference between dictation that always works and dictation that stops on a Tuesday morning because you forgot to log in somewhere three weeks ago.
Automatic top-up needs the spending limit, not instead of it
The two belong together. A top-up that refills on its own, with no ceiling above it, is a bucket with the tap left running: whatever goes wrong keeps being paid for. Set the monthly limit first, then let the top-up keep you under it.
Make a key that only Vito uses
If you already use the same provider for something else, create a separate key rather than reusing one. It costs nothing, it tells you from the provider's usage page what Vito actually spends, and if you ever need to revoke it you won't break anything else in the process.
If it leaks, revoke it
Deleting a key at the provider makes it useless immediately — there is no grace period to worry about and no way for anyone to keep using it. Create a fresh one, paste that into Vito, and carry on. Rotating a key is a two-minute job, so do it at the first suspicion rather than waiting for certainty.
The bill is yours
You are the account holder. The provider bills you directly, at their prices, for whatever the key is used for. Vito is not a middleman: it holds no account on your behalf, never sees your usage, and cannot cap, refund or dispute anything. Which also means the savings are yours — nobody is taking a cut — but so is the responsibility.
Where Vito keeps it
On your own machine, in Vito's settings, and it is sent only to the provider it belongs to. Nobody at Vito can read it. That is the point, and it has one consequence worth knowing: nobody can recover it for you either. Lose it and you make a new one.
If something doesn't work
"Credit balance is too low"
Exactly what it says: the API needs prepaid credits, and a Claude subscription does not supply them. Buy credits under Billing in the Console.
Vito says the key is invalid
Usually a copy-paste problem — a character clipped from the front, or a trailing space. Paste it again cleanly. Failing that, make a new key; that is quicker than working out what went wrong with the old one.
Cleanup stopped working but transcription still runs
The two keys are independent, which is the useful part: it tells you the problem is on the Anthropic side. Check the balance and the spend limit — a limit you have reached looks a lot like a broken key.
After this
Claude handles the tidying. The listening is a separate service with its own key — if you haven't set that up yet, start with Soniox.