When typing hurts,
keep writing anyway
Repetitive strain injury quietly rewrites how you work: you shorten emails, dodge the long explanation, choose words by how they type instead of what they say. Dictation gives the long version back. This page covers the honest limits, and how to set up voice-first writing on Windows.
When the keyboard becomes the problem
Common in desk work
Carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis and related strain injuries are a routine cost of long days at a keyboard. We're not going to quote statistics at you — if typing already hurts, you know the shape of it.
The familiar pattern
Wrist, hand, neck and shoulder pain, worse at the end of the day and worse in a week with a lot of writing in it. Long daily keyboard exposure and static posture are established risk factors (Cleveland Clinic overview).
Not medical advice
Dictation reduces keystrokes — it doesn't treat an injury, so if you have pain, see a clinician and an ergonomist; voice input is one tool in a larger plan.
A practical setup
Control vs writing — two tools
For hands-free control of the PC (clicking, opening apps), Windows 11's built-in Voice Access is free, on-device, and good — use it. For writing, pair it with a dictation tool that cleans up natural speech, so a rambled thought becomes a sendable paragraph without hand-edits.
Two taps, hands down between them
Push-to-talk means holding a key down for the length of every sentence. Blabb defaults to tap-to-start instead: one press of F9 begins recording, your hands drop to your lap, and a second press ends it. Recording runs until you stop it, so it doesn't cut out when you pause for thought. Two taps a dictation, nothing held in between. Prefer to hold the key? That mode is still there.
Why cleanup matters doubly for RSI
Verbatim transcription still needs hand corrections — punctuation, fillers, false starts — which puts keystrokes right back in the loop. Blabb's on-device AI removes filler, punctuates, and converts numbers automatically, so the two hotkey presses cover the whole flow — fewer touches per sentence is the entire point.
Fewer corrections over time
Blabb's glossary learns your names, jargon, and acronyms from the corrections you do make — stored locally — so the correction burden shrinks with use. History keeps the original words beside the cleaned-up text and copies either one, so a cleanup you don't like costs you a copy rather than a retype.
Get the long words back.
Fourteen days free. Speech and cleanup both run on your PC. One hotkey, hands stay down.
FREE TIER 2,000 WORDS/DAY · 14-DAY UNLIMITED TRIAL IN-APP · CANCEL ANY TIME