C:/Program Files/Git/voice transcription mistypes ~50% of words in noisy environments (street/store)

Summary

/voice (hold-to-record dictation, push-to-hold mode) mistypes roughly half of what I say when there is background noise. Words are not just dropped — they are confidently replaced with different, unrelated words. The output reads like a plausible sentence but is not what I said.

Environment

• OS: Windows 11 Home Single Language 10.0.26200
• Claude Code: Opus 4.7 (1M context)
• Voice mode: hold (Space-to-record)
• Dictation language: en
• Location at time of failure: near a road / inside a retail store (traffic + ambient store noise)
• Mic: built-in laptop mic (no headset)

Symptom

Held Space, spoke a sentence at normal volume, released. The transcription that appeared in the prompt was about 50% wrong — substituted words, not blanks. Examples of the kinds of substitutions I saw in this session:

• "rate" was transcribed as "read"
• "almost" came through as garbled noise that read as different English words

I was trying to fix an issue in code at the time, so the wrong words ended up in messages I was sending an AI assistant, which then acted on them.

Expected

In noisy conditions, I would rather see:

• a confidence indicator, or
• explicit \\[unclear\\] markers for low-confidence spans, or
• a higher rejection threshold so noisy audio returns "couldn't hear that, try again" rather than a confident wrong guess.

Repro

1. Enable /voice (hold mode)
2. Stand near traffic or inside a store with ambient noise
3. Hold Space, speak a normal sentence
4. Release

Result: a sentence appears in the prompt that is grammatically reasonable but ~50% different words from what was actually said.

Why it matters

When the dictated text is going into a coding agent that will then take actions (edit files, run commands, push branches), confidently-wrong transcription is significantly worse than no transcription. A mishear can cause the agent to do the wrong thing without the user noticing until after the action runs.

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Filed on behalf of a user who hit this while working on a real fix in a noisy environment.