Dictation for hands that need a rest
RSI · carpal tunnel · arthritis · injury · plain typing pain
If typing hurts, every email, note and form is a cost your hands pay. Dictation isn't a productivity trick for you — it's how the work gets done while your hands recover. UtterKey was built to be spoken to all day: hold (or tap) one key, talk naturally, and the typing happens wherever your cursor is.
Why it suits hands in trouble, specifically
It works everywhere — including forms
Most dictation tools transcribe into their own window and make you paste — useless across a 40-field form, and every paste is more clicking. UtterKey types at your cursor, in any app: email, documents, browsers, work systems, web forms. Tab to a field, speak, tab, speak.
Punctuation without keystrokes
The AI places punctuation, capitals and paragraphs from your natural speech — you don't type them, and you don't have to say "comma" either. Fewer touches of the keyboard is the entire point.
You choose which key, and where it is
Dictation runs while the key is held. You are not stuck with ours: pick the key or combination that your hands find easiest — a modifier you can rest a finger on, a key on a foot pedal or assistive device, whatever your setup already uses. If holding any key is the part that hurts, read the honest limits below before you buy.
Snippets: one word, whole paragraphs
The text you type most often — sign-offs, standard replies, addresses — becomes a snippet: say one trigger word and the full saved paragraph is typed for you. Repetition is exactly what strained hands can't afford; snippets remove it.
It types what you said, not what it expects
Speech models of this generation have a documented habit: trained largely on captioned video, they can fill a silence at the end of a recording with the words that end most videos — “Thank you for watching”. We kept finding it in our own dictations, so in version 0.4.3 we removed the cause: UtterKey trims the silence after your last word before anything is transcribed, with a half-second cushion so a word you let trail off is still captured. We will not promise that no AI ever mishears anyone — a noisy room still costs you a correction — but a phrase you never spoke should not be arriving at the end of your sentences.
No company cloud, so no company outage
When your hands depend on a tool, an outage isn't an inconvenience — it's hours locked out of your own words. UtterKey has no vendor cloud to go down: it talks straight to your own AI account (OpenAI or Groq, your key, your choice), and you can hold keys for both providers — if one stumbles, dictation continues on the other automatically.
Buy once
No subscription stacked on top of everything hands trouble already costs. Pay for the app one time, and your only running cost is your own AI account — typically cents a day.
Requesting it at work
Employers usually ask for a rationale before approving software as a workplace adjustment. Take these — they're the honest facts:
- System-wide dictation (all applications, not one) is the standard reasonable-adjustment request for repetitive strain injury and similar conditions.
- Modern AI recognition (Whisper-class) exceeds legacy Dragon accuracy with zero voice-profile training — no paid hours spent "training" software.
- Dragon costs $699 per seat and was discontinued on the Mac in 2018; UtterKey is a fraction of that, one-time, and covers Mac and Windows on one licence.
- No vendor cloud in the audio path — a point your IT and privacy reviewers can verify themselves: the verification page.
Honest limits — so you buy with open eyes
- There's an adjustment fortnight. Dictating all day is a voice workout at first, and composing aloud feels strange for a week or two before it clicks. Budget for that.
- You hold the key while you speak. There is no tap-to-start, tap-to-stop mode — dictation runs while the key is down and stops when you let go. For some hands that is fine and for others it is the whole problem, so try it inside the money-back window before you rely on it. If a hands-free toggle is what you need, tell us and we will say honestly whether it is coming.
- One stretch of dictation is capped at five minutes. That is a long paragraph or a short letter, not a whole report in one breath. The app warns you as it approaches the limit and keeps what you said.
- Editing stays a keyboard job. Voice is superb for producing text and poor for revising it. Dictation cuts your keystrokes dramatically; it doesn't reach zero.
- Dictating computer code isn't really solved — by anyone. Comments, documentation and messages work well; syntax doesn't.
- And we make no medical promises. UtterKey reduces how much you type; what that means for your hands is between you and whoever treats them.
Get UtterKey — buy once →
14-day money-back guarantee, so the adjustment fortnight is on us. Questions: hello@utterkey.com
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