u/Omega0Alpha

For the past few months I've been feeling real pain in my fingers and forearms while typing. So I started looking for alternatives and found Wispr Flow. Genuinely liked it - until I saw $15 a month, forever, for a 1.3GB Electron app.

Is it rent??

I looked at every other Windows option. All subscriptions. Every single one. It's like the entire category decided typing pain is a great opportunity to LEECH and never let go.

So I just built it myself.

Took a week. It's 11MB (on disk) - not gigabytes, megabytes. Uses Gemini's API which has a free tier, so you're not paying me AND paying OpenAI. One-time payment, no monthly anchor around your neck.

Works in any app globally. Not just one text box. Anywhere you can type.

It's not perfect. But my fingers and forearms are doing a lot better - and that was the whole point.

Built it because I had no other choice. Still using it every day.

If you're in the same boat: check the comments

Happy to answer anything about how it works under the hood.

For the past few months I've been feeling real pain in my fingers and forearms while typing. So I started looking for alternatives and found Wispr Flow. Genuinely liked it - until I saw $15 a month, forever, for a 1.3GB Electron app.

Is it rent??

I looked at every other Windows option. All subscriptions. Every single one. It's like the entire category decided typing pain is a great opportunity to LEECH and never let go.

So I just built it myself.

Took a week. It's 11MB (on disk) - not gigabytes, megabytes. Uses Gemini's API which has a free tier, so you're not paying me AND paying OpenAI. One-time payment, no monthly anchor around your neck.

Works in any app globally. Not just one text box. Anywhere you can type.

It's not perfect. But my fingers and forearms are doing a lot better - and that was the whole point.

Built it because I had no other choice. Still using it every day.

If you're in the same boat: check the comments

Happy to answer anything about how it works under the hood.

That ratio broke something in my brain.

Think about what you actually do at a keyboard all day. Not just writing. Correcting. Moving the cursor to exactly the right spot. Selecting the wrong word. Deleting it. Retyping it. Fixing the spacing it left behind. Fixing the punctuation. Realizing the sentence broke. Fixing that too.

We don't call this typing. We call it "working."

Speech-to-text was supposed to fix this. And it does...for about 30 seconds.

Then the transcript has a mistake. And suddenly you're hunting through a wall of spoken words trying to find one wrong syllable buried somewhere in paragraph four. You're scrolling, squinting, re-reading your own words like a detective looking for evidence.

That's not a voice interface. That's typing with extra steps and a worse cursor.

The real bottleneck was never transcription. Everyone solved transcription.

The bottleneck is correction.

Speech is fast and loose. Text needs to be precise. And the moment those two things collide, voice loses and your hands pay the price.

Not another dictation tool. A system where voice handles the flow and the keyboard only touches what actually needs touching.

I'm experimenting with an idea along those lines, because the keyboard can be really damaging after long hours of work

I've had RSI for two years. Typing wrecked my forearms first, then my wrists decided to join the party (a bit emotional, bee coding since I was a child).

So I did what everyone here eventually does. Switched to voice.

For about 30 seconds, it felt like the answer

Then the transcript made a mistake. And suddenly I was doing the exact same keyboard dance I was trying to escape

Except now I'm also hunting through a wall of spoken words to find the one wrong syllable buried in paragraph four.

Move cursor, Find wrong word, Select it, Delete it, Retype it, Fix the spacing it left behind. Fix the punctuation. Hope the sentence still makes sense.

That's not a voice interface. That's typing with extra steps and a worse cursor.

I realized: the problem was never transcription. Everyone solved transcription. The problem is correction.

Because speech is fast and loose. Text needs to be exact. And the moment those two things collide, your hands pay the price. Again.

The thing that actually helped me wasn't better AI or smarter autocorrect.

It was a system that shows me what it's unsure about

So I only correct those parts. Tab to move. Enter to accept. A number to choose. Never throws me back into normal editing mode.

It shows me what to fix so I actually fix it in seconds, not minutes.

My hands are still not what they were. But I'm no longer typing through a full day of work just to clean up after my own voice.

Anyone else gone down the speech-to-text rabbit hole and felt like you just traded one problem for another?