GuidesWWorkspacesAnatomy of a workspace
Beginner6 min read

Anatomy of a workspace

What a workspace actually holds — four categories of knowledge entries, plus the settings most people never find.

A workspace decides how your dictation is rewritten before it is typed. Without one, a Slack message and a customer email come out in the same voice. With one, each gets treated appropriately.

Four categories of entries

The most common misunderstanding is that a workspace has four text boxes. It does not. It holds a list of entries, each with a title and a body, filed under one of four categories — and you can have as many of each as you like, switching individual entries on and off:

CategoryAnswers
Tone adjustmentWhat voice should this be in?
Output styleHow should it be shaped — prose, bullets, an email body?
Domain contextWhat subject matter is this, so terms are heard correctly?
Custom instructionsAnything else — your do's and don'ts
Because entries toggle independently, keep them small and single-purpose. One entry per rule is much easier to debug than one long entry with six rules in it.

Entries can also be files rather than typed text. Plain text, Markdown, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, logs and PDFs are accepted, up to 10 MB, with PDFs read up to the first 50 pages.

How they reach the model

At dictation time, active entries are grouped by category and wrapped in labelled blocks that the system prompt knows how to interpret:

what the model receives
[TONE ADJUSTMENT] …your tone entries… [/TONE ADJUSTMENT] [OUTPUT STYLE] …your style entries… [/OUTPUT STYLE] [DOMAIN CONTEXT] … [/DOMAIN CONTEXT] [CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONS] … [/CUSTOM INSTRUCTIONS]

Your raw transcript arrives separately, explicitly marked as speech to clean up rather than as instructions to follow. That separation is what stops a dictated sentence like "ignore the previous instruction" from hijacking the rewrite.

Workspace content is capped at 40,000 characters by default. Past that it is truncated at a sentence boundary and marked as truncated, so a huge attached document will be cut rather than silently dropped.

The settings people miss

Beyond entries, each workspace carries:

  • Tags — what makes it activate automatically. See Auto-detecting workspaces.
  • Vocabulary — terms to bias transcription toward. See Vocabulary and dictionary.
  • Preferred language — force a spoken language instead of auto-detecting
  • Preferred speech and text models — override your global choice for this context only
  • Voice Only mode — skip AI refinement entirely and inject the raw transcript
  • Default — the fallback when nothing else matches
Voice Only is underrated. For a terminal or a code editor, an untouched transcript is often better than a polished one — refinement is what turns cd dot dot into prose you did not want.

What you start with

Four workspaces are created on first launch:

WorkspaceSet up as
Speech / VoiceThe default, with AI refinement off — raw transcription
ChatCasual tone, plain message, conversational
EmailProfessional tone, email body, polished
Note TakingNeutral tone, bullet list, concise
!
None of them carry tags, so none of them auto-activate. Out of the box everything falls through to Speech / Voice and you get unrefined transcription. If InkSpoke seems to be ignoring tone settings, this is almost always why — add tags, or pin a workspace.

How many you can have

The free plan allows five workspaces. Since four are seeded, that is the defaults plus one of your own. Pro and perpetual licences are unlimited.

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