Voice to Text for DevOps Engineers

When you're managing infrastructure, every second matters. Typing runbook updates during an outage or documenting Terraform modules shouldn't slow you down. Blurt lets you speak your documentation, incident updates, and Slack messages while your hands stay on the keyboard. Hold a button, say what you need, release. Text appears at your cursor — in terminal, GitHub, PagerDuty, anywhere. No context switching during critical moments.

Free to start Works in terminal, Slack, GitHub No configuration needed
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The Typing Problem

Typing incident updates while everything is on fire

The production database is down. Your CEO is asking for updates. Slack is blowing up. You know exactly what's happening — you could explain it in 10 seconds — but typing a coherent status update while simultaneously running queries and checking logs feels impossible. So you type 'investigating' and promise yourself you'll write a real update later. You never do.

Documenting Terraform modules at the end of a long day

You finally got that complex infrastructure change working after three hours of debugging. Now you need to document what you did and why. Your brain is fried from reading error messages. Your hands are tired from typing commands. Writing clear documentation explaining your module choices feels like running a marathon after a sprint. The docs end up thin at best, missing at worst.

Writing runbooks that nobody will follow because they're incomplete

You know the on-call rotation needs better runbooks. But writing step-by-step procedures for every failure mode takes forever. You could talk through how to fix the Redis connection issue in two minutes, but typing it with proper formatting takes twenty. So the runbooks stay vague, and the 3 AM pages stay painful.

Explaining pipeline failures in GitHub comments

The CI pipeline failed again. Someone asks 'why did this break?' You know the answer — it's the same race condition you've seen before. But explaining it clearly in a GitHub comment means stopping your current work, context switching to writing mode, and typing out the explanation. You write 'known issue, will fix' and move on. The actual explanation never gets documented.

Your wrists are paying for years of terminal commands

Between infrastructure scripts, Slack messages, documentation, and incident responses, you type thousands of words daily. The keyboard shortcuts and terminal commands are muscle memory, but the prose — the explanations, updates, and docs — that's where the typing adds up. Your wrists remind you of this every afternoon.

How It Works

Blurt works everywhere DevOps engineers type — terminal, Slack, GitHub, PagerDuty, Datadog, Notion. If you can put a cursor there, Blurt works there.

1

Hold your hotkey

Press your chosen shortcut. A small indicator shows Blurt is listening.

2

Talk naturally

Say your incident update, runbook step, or Slack reply. Blurt adds punctuation.

3

Release and done

Text appears at your cursor. No copying, no pasting, no extra steps.

Real Scenarios

Documenting Terraform modules inline

You just wrote a complex module for multi-region failover. Future-you needs to understand why you made certain choices. Cursor in the comments section, hold button, say 'This module creates active-passive failover across us-east-1 and us-west-2. We use Route53 health checks rather than manual failover to reduce recovery time. See ADR-042 for the architecture decision.' Documentation written before you forget the context.

Creating runbook entries after solving a problem

You just fixed a rare edge case that took an hour to diagnose. The on-call engineer who hits this at 3 AM deserves better than 'restart the service.' Hold button and speak: 'If Redis shows connection refused but the container is running, check for zombie connections. Run redis-cli info clients and look for connected_clients over 500. Kill stale connections with CLIENT KILL TYPE normal.' Runbook entry done in 15 seconds.

Explaining CI pipeline failures in pull requests

A junior engineer asks why their build failed. You could type out the explanation, but you're in the middle of debugging something else. Hold your hotkey: 'The test is failing because the database migrations run in a different order in CI than locally. Add the depends_on annotation to your migration file. See the wiki page on migration ordering for details.' Explanation provided, context preserved.

Slack updates during deploy windows

You're in the middle of a production deployment and the team needs updates. Alt-tabbing to Slack, typing, and switching back breaks your concentration. Hold button, say 'Deployment to staging complete. Starting canary rollout to 5 percent of production traffic. Monitoring error rates in Datadog.' Status shared in 5 seconds. Back to watching the metrics dashboard.

Writing postmortem notes while the details are fresh

The incident is resolved but the postmortem is tomorrow. You need to capture what happened while you remember. Hold and speak: 'Timeline: Alert fired at 14:23 UTC. Initial triage showed database connection pool exhausted. Root cause was a query that skipped an index after the schema migration. Mitigation applied at 14:47, full resolution at 15:02.' Notes captured for the postmortem doc without another hour of typing.

Adding context to PagerDuty alerts

You're resolving an alert and need to add notes for the next person who sees this. Hold button: 'This alert fires when Kafka consumer lag exceeds 10 thousand messages. Usually caused by slow downstream processing during traffic spikes. Check the consumer group status before restarting, restart usually fixes it within 5 minutes.' Alert resolved with context for future on-call engineers.

Why DevOps engineers choose Blurt over built-in dictation

Blurt macOS Dictation
Activation Single hotkey, instant start Click microphone icon or double-tap keyboard
Speed Text appears in under 500ms 2-3 second delay typical
Terminal work Works alongside terminal sessions Often interferes with terminal focus
Technical terms Handles Kubernetes, Terraform, and infra terms Struggles with technical vocabulary

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Blurt work in the terminal?
Yes. Blurt works anywhere you can place a cursor on macOS, including Terminal, iTerm2, and any other terminal emulator. It inserts text exactly where your cursor is.
Can I use Blurt during an active incident?
Absolutely. Blurt is especially useful during incidents when you need to communicate quickly without stopping your investigation. Hold, speak your update, release — your hands stay on the keyboard for the real work.
Does Blurt handle infrastructure terminology?
Blurt handles most DevOps terms well — Kubernetes, Terraform, Docker, AWS services. Highly specialized internal terms might need occasional edits, but common infrastructure vocabulary transcribes accurately.
Will it interfere with my terminal shortcuts?
No. You choose your own hotkey during setup. Pick any combination that doesn't conflict with your terminal or other tools. Most engineers use a modifier combination they're not already using.
Can I dictate while on a Zoom bridge during an incident?
Yes. Blurt captures audio through your microphone independently of call software. You can be muted on the incident bridge and still dictate Slack updates or runbook notes without others hearing.
How much does Blurt cost?
Blurt offers a free tier with first 1,000 words free. For unlimited usage, it's $10/month or $99/year. No credit card required to start.

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