Voice to Text for Site Reliability Engineers
When production is on fire, you need both hands on the keyboard diagnosing the issue — not typing status updates. Blurt lets you speak your incident communications, runbook notes, and postmortem drafts while you keep working. Hold a button, say what needs to be said, release. Text appears in Slack, your terminal, or anywhere else. Your incident response stays fast. Your documentation actually gets written.
The Typing Problem
Typing status updates during an active incident
The database is down. Your CEO is watching the incident channel. Every stakeholder wants an update. But every second you spend typing 'Still investigating, appears to be connection pool exhaustion' is a second you're not actually fixing the problem. Your fingers are torn between the terminal and Slack. The pressure mounts with every minute of downtime.
Writing postmortems after exhausting incident response
You just spent four hours on a P1. Your adrenaline has crashed. Now someone wants a detailed postmortem while the context is fresh. But your brain is fried and your wrists hurt from all that typing during the incident. You stare at the blank document, trying to reconstruct the timeline. The postmortem becomes a chore instead of a learning opportunity.
Keeping runbooks updated as systems change
You know exactly how to fix this issue. You've done it three times. But the runbook is outdated because updating documentation means more typing after you've already typed thousands of words troubleshooting. So the runbook stays stale. Next time someone else is on-call, they'll struggle with the same problem you've already solved.
Real-time Slack updates while debugging in terminal
You're tailing logs, checking metrics, running queries. But the incident channel is blowing up with 'Any update?' messages. Switching from terminal to Slack breaks your concentration. By the time you've typed a status update and switched back, you've lost track of which log line you were examining. The investigation slows down because of communication overhead.
Documenting SLO breaches and error budgets
The monthly SLO review is coming. You need to document why the error budget burned, what incidents contributed, and what remediation is planned. It's all in your head — you could explain it verbally in ten minutes. But typing it out takes an hour. You find yourself dreading these reports, rushing through them, or pushing them off until the last minute.
How It Works
Blurt works everywhere SREs spend their day — Slack, PagerDuty, Grafana annotations, terminal sessions, Notion, and any text field on macOS.
Hold your hotkey
Press your chosen shortcut. A small indicator shows Blurt is listening.
Talk naturally
Say your incident update, runbook step, or postmortem note. Blurt adds punctuation.
Release and done
Text appears at your cursor instantly. No copying, no pasting, no workflow interruption.
Real Scenarios
Broadcasting incident updates without leaving your terminal
Database latency just spiked to 500ms. You're watching Datadog and running queries. The incident channel needs an update. Switch to Slack, hold button, say 'Identified the issue as connection pool exhaustion on the primary replica. Rolling restart in progress. ETA 5 minutes.' Release. Back to your terminal in 3 seconds. Stakeholders informed. Investigation uninterrupted.
Drafting postmortem notes while the incident is still happening
You just discovered root cause. In an hour, you'll forget the exact sequence of events. Hold button, say 'Root cause was a memory leak in the cache service introduced in deployment 847. First symptoms appeared at 14:23 UTC when error rates crossed 5 percent.' Release. Your postmortem draft is building itself while you're still responding. Future-you gets accurate timelines.
Updating runbooks in real-time
You just found a faster fix than what's documented. The runbook says to restart all pods. You discovered restarting just the worker pods is enough. Hold button, say 'Update step 3: Only restart worker pods using kubectl rollout restart deployment slash workers. Full restart is not necessary and adds 10 minutes to recovery time.' Runbook improved for the next person on-call.
Annotating Grafana dashboards during analysis
You spot a correlation between CPU spike and error rate. Hold button, say 'CPU spike at 15:42 caused by batch job overlap. See incident 2847 for remediation.' Release. The annotation is on your dashboard. Six months from now, when someone sees the same pattern, they'll have context instead of starting from scratch.
Writing SLO documentation and error budget reports
Monthly review time. Hold button, talk through what happened: 'Error budget burned 47 percent this month. Primary contributor was the March 15th database incident, accounting for 32 percent. Secondary was API timeout issues from the third party payment provider.' Your report is drafted while you're still looking at the charts. No more dreading documentation day.
Responding to PagerDuty acknowledgments
Alert fires at 3 AM. You're on your phone checking metrics but need to add context for the team. Hold button, say 'Acknowledged. Initial triage shows this is a disk space alert on the logging cluster. Non-critical. Will investigate in the morning.' Context captured while you're still half asleep. Your team knows what's happening without you typing on a tiny keyboard.
Explaining complex infrastructure changes in PRs
Your Terraform change modifies 47 resources. Reviewers need context. Hold button, explain your reasoning: 'This migrates the Redis cluster to a new instance type with 2x memory. Staged rollout over three days. Rollback plan is to revert this PR and run terraform apply. No downtime expected.' Technical context captured in seconds instead of minutes of typing.
Why SREs choose Blurt over built-in dictation
| Blurt | macOS Dictation | |
|---|---|---|
| Activation | Single hotkey, instant start | Click microphone icon or 'Hey Siri' |
| Speed | Text appears in under 500ms | 2-3 second delay before transcription |
| Reliability | Consistent accuracy, even at 3 AM | Often fails silently or mishears |
| Technical terms | Handles kubectl, Terraform, pod names | Struggles with infrastructure jargon |
Frequently Asked Questions
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