This article has been contributed by Rahul Bansal, Founder of Dictation Daddy, AI powered Dictation tool that understands your intent.
The Breaking Point
The pain started in my arms last year, a dull ache that grew sharper with each keystroke. After spending nearly three years building products as an indie hacker, my body was sending me a clear message: the endless typing had to stop. What began as a personal health crisis would eventually transform into a product that doctors, lawyers, and professionals around the world now rely on daily.
The Search for a Solution
I tried everything: the built-in Mac dictation tool, various Chrome extensions, even the legendary Dragon Dictation. They all shared the same fundamental flaws. The accuracy was terrible, and sophisticated tools like Dragon came with hefty price tags and demanded hours of training. As someone dealing with arm pain, the last thing I wanted was to invest weeks teaching software to understand me.
Around this time, OpenAI released Whisper. Within days, I had cobbled together a basic Chrome extension that used Whisper for transcription. The results were remarkable. The accuracy was leagues better than anything I’d tried, and it required zero training.
Early Validation
I shared my crude prototype with a few friends. To my surprise, they started using it daily, integrating it into their workflows. Their excitement validated what I had suspected: this wasn’t just solving my problem.
Creating something people would actually want to use was challenging. Most people believe typing is simply faster than speaking. Convincing them to switch required more than just good transcription accuracy. The user experience had to be flawless. Any lag between speaking and seeing text would break the flow. I obsessed over milliseconds of latency, constantly asking myself: does this feel as natural as typing?
Beyond Basic Transcription
Transcription accuracy was just the foundation. Real human speech is messy. We stumble over words, repeat ourselves, pepper our sentences with filler words. A raw transcript of natural speech is often painful to read.
I built in intelligent processing that goes far beyond basic transcription. The tool automatically removes filler words, detects and eliminates repetitions, and cleans up false starts. Grammar fixing happens in real-time. The tool intelligently corrects grammar without losing your voice or intent. It knows when you’re dictating a casual email versus a formal report and adjusts accordingly. Formatting is handled automatically too, recognizing lists, paragraph breaks, and properly capitalizing sentences.
Finding Early Product-Market Fit
My philosophy has always been to ship early and validate with real payments. I started creating YouTube videos demonstrating the tool. These weren’t polished marketing videos; they were authentic glimpses into how the product actually worked.
Emails started arriving from Dubai, from various European countries. Professionals were discovering my tool, reporting specific issues, requesting features, and asking how they could pay for it. A doctor in Germany explained how he needed to dictate patient notes. A lawyer in London described spending hours writing case briefs.
I added a payment link and started seeing transactions come through. People weren’t just trying the tool; they were committing to it, many purchasing lifetime deals. This early traction pushed me to take the product seriously.
Evolution and Growth
The product evolved beyond a simple Chrome extension. I developed desktop and mobile applications. One of the most requested features was custom vocabulary support. Doctors needed medical terms recognized correctly, lawyers had specific legal jargon. The AI gradually learns each user’s speaking style, improving accuracy the more it’s used.
Today, the tool serves a diverse professional community. Doctors use it to quickly capture patient consultations. Lawyers draft briefs at the speed of thought. Business professionals have replaced much of their typing with speaking, from composing emails to interacting with AI language models through voice.
What makes professionals stick with the tool is the polished output. They can speak naturally, with all the hesitations of normal speech, and receive clean, professional text that’s ready to send or publish.
Lessons Learned
The journey taught me a fundamental lesson: solve problems you personally experience. When you’re your own primary user, every pain point is immediately obvious. The feedback loop is instantaneous. Building for some theoretical user persona means constantly guessing what they might want. Building for yourself means knowing exactly what needs to be fixed.
The Future of Dictation
The next generation of dictation tools won’t just transcribe what we say. They’ll understand intent, suggest completions, and learn our communication patterns. Imagine speaking a rough idea and watching as AI helps shape it into polished prose in real-time. We’ll shift from being creators to editors, approving and guiding rather than crafting from scratch.
Future interfaces will blend dictation with intelligent suggestion so seamlessly that the boundary between human thought and machine assistance will blur. The system will understand context and anticipate what you’re trying to communicate before you’ve fully articulated it.
My typing injury forced me to find a better way to work, but it also revealed an opportunity to help thousands of others. What started as a personal need has grown into a tool that helps professionals worldwide work more efficiently and comfortably.
The pain in my arms is gone now, but I rarely touch my keyboard for anything beyond quick edits. Speaking my thoughts feels more natural, more fluid, more human. And judging by the growing community of users who’ve made the same switch, I’m not alone in feeling that the future of productivity isn’t in typing faster, but in not typing at all.
Rishi Mundra