Voice to Text for Chronic Pain
Chronic pain is invisible and exhausting. Some days typing feels manageable; other days, every keystroke is a negotiation with your body. You shouldn't have to choose between productivity and physical wellbeing. Blurt gives you a way to work that doesn't require fighting through pain. Hold a button, speak naturally, and your words appear as text. No special equipment. No complex setup. Just one less physical demand on a body that's already dealing with enough.
The Typing Problem
Good days and bad days require different tools
Chronic pain isn't consistent. Some mornings you wake up and typing feels fine. Other days, you know within minutes that your hands won't cooperate. But your deadlines don't adjust to your pain levels. Your inbox doesn't care that today is a flare day. You need a way to work that adapts to how your body feels, not a rigid workflow that assumes every day is the same.
Nobody sees what typing costs you
Chronic pain is invisible. Your colleagues don't see the tension building in your shoulders during a long email. They don't notice you shaking out your hands between Slack messages. They don't know that the meeting notes you just sent took three times longer because you kept stopping to rest. The work gets done, but nobody understands the physical toll it took to get there.
Standard ergonomic advice only goes so far
You've tried the split keyboards. You've adjusted your desk height. You've done the stretches. Maybe they help a little, but they don't solve the fundamental problem: your job requires hours of typing, and your body isn't okay with that. Ergonomics can reduce strain, but they can't eliminate it. You need to reduce the typing itself.
Pacing yourself means falling behind
You know you should take breaks. You know you should pace your typing throughout the day. But there's always one more email to send, one more document to finish, one more message to respond to. When you pace yourself responsibly, work piles up. When you push through, you pay for it tomorrow. There's no winning strategy that's sustainable.
The mental load of managing pain while working
Every task becomes a calculation. How much will this email cost you? Can you afford to type this document, or should you wait until tomorrow? Will finishing this project now mean you can't function this weekend? You're constantly negotiating between what needs to get done and what your body can handle. The cognitive overhead of pain management is exhausting before you even start the actual work.
How It Works
Blurt works anywhere you can type on macOS. Email, documents, chat, notes. One tool that reduces physical strain across everything you do.
Hold your chosen hotkey
Press a keyboard shortcut you select. A small indicator confirms Blurt is listening. This is the only keystroke required.
Speak naturally
Talk at your normal pace. Blurt handles punctuation and capitalization automatically. No special commands to memorize.
Release and your text appears
Your words are inserted wherever your cursor is. No copying, no pasting, no extra steps. Done.
Real Scenarios
Getting through email on a high-pain day
Your inbox has twenty messages waiting. On a normal day, you'd type through them. Today, your hands are telling you to stop before you've started. With Blurt, you move through each email by speaking your replies. A two-sentence response takes five seconds instead of thirty keystrokes. You clear your inbox without the physical cost that would normally come with it.
Writing long documents without sustained typing
Reports, proposals, documentation. These require sustained effort that accumulates physical strain over hours. Instead of typing paragraph after paragraph, you speak your thoughts and watch them appear. You can write a five-page document without your hands touching the keyboard for prose. The mental work stays the same, but the physical demand drops dramatically.
Keeping up with Slack and Teams throughout the day
Chat messages add up. A quick reply here, a longer explanation there. By afternoon, you've typed thousands of words across dozens of conversations. With Blurt, each message is spoken instead of typed. The cumulative physical load of workplace chat becomes nearly zero.
Taking meeting notes without pain payback
Capturing notes during meetings means rapid typing at unpredictable intervals. For chronic pain, this is especially difficult because you can't pace yourself around meeting content. Speaking your notes into a document lets you capture everything without the wrist and hand strain that normally follows a meeting-heavy day.
Responding to clients when you're not at your best
Client communication can't wait for good pain days. When you need to send a thoughtful, professional response but your body isn't cooperating, voice-to-text bridges the gap. You maintain your professional communication standards without forcing yourself through painful typing sessions.
Preserving your hands for work that requires them
Some tasks genuinely need your hands on the keyboard. Coding, spreadsheets, detailed editing. By using voice for everything else, you conserve your physical capacity for the work that truly requires it. Blurt becomes triage for your typing, letting you allocate limited physical resources to where they matter most.
Working consistently instead of boom-and-bust cycles
The pattern is familiar: push through on good days, crash on bad days, repeat. Blurt helps break this cycle by reducing baseline physical demand. When every day requires less from your body, the extremes flatten out. Fewer crash days. More sustainable, consistent productivity.
How Blurt compares to the dictation built into your Mac
| Blurt | macOS Dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| Activation | Single customizable hotkey | Click mic icon or double-tap Fn key |
| Response time | Text appears in under 500ms | 2-3 second delay is common |
| Reliability | Consistent transcription quality | Often fails silently or drops words |
| Works everywhere | Any app where you can type | Inconsistent across applications |
| Punctuation | Added automatically | Requires voice commands |
| Price | $10/month or $99/year | Free but unreliable |
Frequently Asked Questions
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