Styles
How Epilude adapts your dictated text to fit the app you're typing in, with separate styles for messages, email, and everything else.
Styles let you control how Epilude formats your text based on where you're typing. The same dictation can come out polished and punctuated in an email, but lowercase and casual in a chat with a friend.
How Styles work
Every time you dictate, Epilude looks at the app you're typing in and groups it into one of four categories. Each category has its own style, which controls things like capitalization and punctuation. Change the style for a category once, and every app in that category follows it.
The four categories
| Category | Example apps |
|---|---|
| Personal messages | iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Messenger |
| Work messages | Slack, Teams, Discord, Zoom |
| Apple Mail, Outlook, Superhuman, Gmail (web), Spark | |
| Other | Notes, Notion, Word, Docs, code editors, anywhere else |
Epilude detects browser-based apps too. Dictating into Gmail in Chrome, for example, uses your Email style, not your Other style.
The four styles
| Style | What it does |
|---|---|
| Formal | Sentence capitalization, full punctuation |
| Casual | Sentence capitalization, lighter punctuation |
| Very casual | All lowercase, minimal punctuation |
| Excited | Sentence capitalization, exclamation points where they fit |
Not every style is offered in every category. Personal messages skip Excited; Work messages, Email, and Other skip Very casual. The defaults are Casual for messages and Formal for email and other writing.
Same words, different vibe
Styles only change formatting. They never change your word choice or rewrite what you said.
Setting your styles
Open the Styles section
Open Epilude and click Styles in the sidebar.
Pick a category
Use the tabs at the top to switch between Personal messages, Work messages, Email, and Other.
Pick a style
Click the style card you want for that category. The change applies to your next dictation, no restart needed.
You can also run through a guided setup the first time you open the section, which walks you through all four categories in order.
How Epilude picks the right style
When you finish dictating, Epilude:
- Looks at the frontmost app on your Mac
- Matches it to one of the four categories
- Applies the style you picked for that category
For browsers, Epilude reads the active window title to figure out which web app you're using. So Gmail, Outlook on the web, Slack in the browser, and the rest land in the same category as their native counterparts.
If an app doesn't match any of the messaging or email categories, it falls into Other.
Troubleshooting
- My app keeps using the wrong style. Most likely it's landing in the Other category. That's currently the catch-all for any app that isn't a known messaging or email client. Set your Other style to whatever you want for general writing.
- I changed the style but my next dictation looks the same. Confirm you have an AI provider configured in Settings > AI Providers. Without one, Epilude falls back to Smart Formatting, which doesn't apply per-category styles.
- Can I set a different style for one specific app? Not today. Styles work at the category level, not per app.
Related
- Auto-Edits — How Epilude polishes your text after transcription
- Smart Formatting — Local, rule-based formatting with voice cues