Voice to Text for Scrivener
Scrivener is where serious authors write their books. But typing thousands of words per day exhausts your hands and slows your creative flow. Blurt lets you hold a button, speak your story, and release. Your text appears instantly in any Scrivener document, whether you're drafting scenes, building character sheets, or capturing research notes. No copying, no workflow interruption. Just talk and write your book.
The Typing Problem
Your hands cannot keep up with your imagination
The scene is playing out in your head. Dialogue flows, action unfolds, emotions run high. But your fingers can only type sixty words per minute. By the time you finish typing one sentence, three more have evaporated from your mind. The vivid scene in your head becomes a pale shadow on the page because your typing speed bottlenecks your creative flow.
Writing 2,000 words a day destroys your wrists
Professional authors aim for 1,500 to 3,000 words daily. That's hours of sustained typing, day after day, month after month. Your wrists ache. Your fingers cramp. Some days you stop writing not because you're out of ideas, but because your body can't take more keystrokes. Repetitive strain threatens to derail your writing career entirely.
Character sheets and world-building notes never get filled out
Scrivener's binder is perfect for organizing character backstories, location descriptions, and world-building details. But typing all that supplementary material feels like a chore. You know your protagonist's entire history, you can picture every street in your fictional city, but documenting it in character sheets takes time away from actual drafting. Those reference documents stay half-empty.
Research notes lose nuance in the typing translation
You're reading about 17th-century ship construction for your historical novel. Insights click together. You suddenly understand how this detail will inform a scene. But by the time you switch to Scrivener, open your research folder, and type your thoughts, the nuance has faded. Your research notes end up as bullet points instead of the rich observations you had in the moment.
Outlining becomes its own separate project
Before you write the novel, you need to outline it. Scene summaries, chapter breakdowns, narrative arcs. But typing outlines feels almost as time-consuming as writing the draft itself. You spend weeks outlining when you could be drafting. Some writers skip outlining entirely because the typing overhead makes it feel like wasted effort.
How It Works
Blurt works everywhere in Scrivener: manuscript documents, character sheets, research notes, synopses, and annotations. Anywhere you can type, you can talk.
Click into any Scrivener document
Put your cursor in a manuscript scene, character sheet, research note, or synopsis card.
Hold your hotkey and speak your story
Press your chosen key, let the words flow. Blurt adds punctuation automatically.
Release and keep writing
Your text appears at the cursor. Move to the next scene, next chapter, next idea.
Real Scenarios
Drafting first-draft prose at the speed of speech
You're writing the climactic scene where your protagonist confronts the antagonist. The dialogue is crackling in your mind, the tension is real, you can feel the emotion. Hold the button and perform the scene. Speak the dialogue in character voices, describe the action as you see it, let the prose flow at 150 words per minute instead of 60. A scene that would take an hour to type is drafted in twenty minutes. The energy stays on the page because you captured it before it cooled.
Building comprehensive character sheets
Your supporting character needs a backstory. You know who she is: her childhood trauma, her secret ambitions, her speech patterns, her relationship with the protagonist. Open her character sheet in Scrivener's binder, hold the button, and talk through her entire history like you're telling a friend about someone you know well. Ten minutes of speaking produces a rich character document that would have taken forty-five minutes to type. Now you have a reference you'll actually use.
Capturing research insights without losing the thread
You're deep in research for your thriller. Reading about forensic techniques, you suddenly realize how a specific detail could make your murder mystery more plausible. Without leaving your research material, activate Blurt and capture the insight: 'Luminol reacts to bleach, not just blood. The killer thinks she cleaned the scene but actually left a glowing map of her movements. Use this in chapter twelve.' The insight is captured with full context before your brain moves on.
Scene-by-scene outlining in Scrivener's corkboard
You're planning your novel using Scrivener's index cards. Each card needs a scene synopsis. Instead of typing thirty brief summaries, you talk through each one. 'Sarah discovers the letter in her father's desk. She realizes he knew about the conspiracy all along. Emotional beat: betrayal mixed with understanding. Ends with her calling Marcus.' You outline thirty scenes in the time it would have taken to type ten. Your novel has a complete structural plan.
Writing through physical limitations
Your wrists are flaring up from yesterday's marathon writing session. A traditional writer would take a day off. You open Scrivener, hold the button, and dictate your daily words. Your creative momentum continues even when your hands need rest. Writers with chronic pain conditions find they can sustain output that would otherwise be physically impossible. The words get written regardless of what your body can type.
World-building documentation that actually gets done
Your fantasy novel needs a magic system document, a map annotation, a political history of the three kingdoms. This supplementary material lives in Scrivener's research folder, but you never get around to writing it. With Blurt, you talk through your world like you're explaining it to a collaborator. 'Magic in this world comes from consuming gemstones. Each stone grants a different ability for twelve hours. Nobles control the mines, which is why the peasant uprising uses smuggled gems.' Your world-building becomes as easy as daydreaming out loud.
Revision notes that capture your full thinking
You're reading through your second draft and something isn't working in chapter eight. You can feel the problem but articulating it while typing is tedious. Hold the button and talk through your revision thoughts: 'The pacing drags here because we already know Marcus will betray them. Consider moving the reveal to chapter ten and adding a false alliance scene here instead. Also the weather metaphor is heavy-handed, make it subtler.' Detailed revision notes that would take five minutes to type are captured in forty-five seconds.
Some writers use built-in dictation. Here's how Blurt compares to macOS Dictation.
| Blurt | macOS Dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| Activation method | Hold hotkey to record, release to finish | Double-tap key, speak, then wait for auto-stop or tap again |
| Accuracy for creative writing | Optimized for natural speech including dialogue and prose | Optimized for general dictation |
| Punctuation | Automatic punctuation, no verbal commands needed | Say 'period' or 'comma' or enable auto-punctuation |
| Works offline | No, requires internet | Enhanced Dictation works offline |
| Ideal for | Long-form creative writing, manuscripts, scene drafting | Short messages and basic text entry |
| Pricing | $10/month or $99/year | Free with macOS |
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