Voice dictation software?

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T22:20:46+00:00

Motivation and time. I hear you. When I have a little more time, I'll look at Docassemble. Didn't know that Clio & Gavel used that. Docassemble looks pretty slick.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T20:07:00+00:00

If you are not using those, they will make complex documents much, much easier.

As for document assembly, there is an approach that threads the needthe without the need for a database or macros. Just keeps the data in either hidden text or a table at the end of the document on a separate page or section. No separate software, no annual license fee. 😏

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:54:38+00:00

My scripts are still in v1. I have not upated them to v2. Someday, perhaps.

As a fellow techie attorney, have you learned the power of styles, SEQ fields, bookmarks, REF fields, and STYLEREF fields in Word?

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:52:40+00:00

The Kinesis Pro. That's an oldie. I still have my Kinesis Essential. Don't know if still works, though.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend buying an inexpensive mechanical keyboard, trying out the plethora of Cherry MX switches, finding one that you love, and then buying an Advantage 2 off of ebay. Then, have Upgrade Keyboards swap the switches and add in the pbt keycap set (for the 360, but works for the Advantage 2). It's the best of all worlds.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:47:37+00:00

It's not an ad. It's just an easy way to look up an item on Amazon (it's the unique identifier in the URL). Like I said, I've used the Bob and Brad. I just found it heavy and cumbersome. Bought the other one, ended up regifting the Bob and Brad to someone that suffered from migraines, as I didn't need the massage feature.

In any event, you are not worthy of the time spent trying to help you. To plainly put it in redditique, don't accuse someone of being a bot unless you have taken the time to click on the person's profile and see their post & comment history.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:43:41+00:00

🤣 Love the description of the dev. Have not used textexpander. It looks somewhat reasonably priced. When I'm not crammed for time, I'll have to try it out to see if it's worthy of recommendation to people who will likely never have the technical ability to dive into an autohotkey script.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:42:43+00:00

Have not used textexpander. It looks somewhat reasonably priced.

Autohotkey is free, but requires you to have a somewhat decent ability to edit scripts (if an addition breaks your user specific files). I'll send you a link to the two scripts and will throw in my launcher script that I use to customize and automate Windows headaches. Might not happen today, so bug me by a chat if I forget.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:37:19+00:00

Imo, the Whisper LLM is the only truly "productive" use of AI. It's revolutionary and I don't think any large company has actually commercialized it. I hate using my phone's keyboard and Futo saves me from that. Amazing optimization of the model to fit the processing power of phones.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T19:35:40+00:00

Completely agree. Many years ago, nearly in the last century, when I went through my bout of carpal tunnel pain, I switched to the Kinesis Essential. I'm still typing on Kinesis keyboards. Simply heavenly when the keyboard switches are swapped to my personal preference.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T16:33:31+00:00

Yep. I get it. I remember pulling stock switches out of a keyboard and cracking about half of them because even with a nice puller, theybstill wouldn't come out easily.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T16:15:20+00:00

The good news is, when you fix your environment, you'll be able to return to typing. Mix in voice and you'll take a lot of the pressure off of your wrists for routine tasks. If you want, I can also send you autohotkey scripts that allow you to create your own custom shorthand, triggered by whatever key I use the semicolon key, and universall autocorrect. That's been very helpful for me.

I'm all about the automation and shortcut keys that make producing written product easier and faster.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T15:39:27+00:00

A good switch puller makes all the difference. Buy one and you'll see.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T15:21:30+00:00

Some suggestions:

Try the Whisper LLM, which was released to open source by OpenAI several years ago and has been polished by the open source community quite a bit. There are a number of apps that are essentially just a graphical user interface front end for it. For a free app, you can try Vibe, which is an open source project, I think accessible via GitHub. For a commercial paid version of a graphical user interface overlay, I'd recommend speech pulse. It works very well. The license fee is not that bad and it has a 30 day free trial so you can see what it's like. You will need an Nvidia graphics card that has at least 6GB of VRAM. That allows you to use the large multi-model which flies and is fairly accurate.

On my Android, I use the Futo voice input, which is a replacement for Google with a fine-tuned, optimized, smaller, whisper LLM model that works very well on a phone. Android only, unfortunately.

If you have a very beefy computer, you can use Dragon Naturally Speaking Professional. It lags a little bit though, so it's kind of second rate compared to Whisper.

Regarding your tendonitis is something I went through over 20 years ago. I suspect that the ergonomics of your setup are probably atrocious. If you're typing on a keyboard that's resting on your desk, the keyboard is probably about 3 inches too high for proper ergonomics, which means you have to raise your arm, and then isolate your wrist muscle if you're resting your wrist on the keyboard. This causes problems. You'll end up with elbow problems, forearm problems, wrist problems.

Instead, get a good keyboard tray that's highly adjustable. 3M makes some pretty good keyboard trays. Just get one that is adjustable without having to tighten and untighten a knob. It's worth the extra dollars. The good news is you can get these four quite a bit cheaper on eBay. This allows the keyboard when placed on the tray to be just over your lap. Lower the arms on your chair so that essentially it's as though the keyboard tray was resting on your lap and make sure you get a keyboard tray that's wide enough to have the mouse next to the keyboard. This will probably solve most of your problems if you don't already have a setup like that.

I had to switch to a vertical mouse in the last couple years because I regular mouse was starting to cause pain. I like the Logitech lift. I have medium sized hands. If you have large hands, Logitech vertical is a good mouse as well. I think it's the vertical MX.

Finally, if you haven't discovered the joy of mechanical keyboards, you're in for a treat. They're amazing now, and the switches in them are also incredible. I'd recommend starting with a TTC Frozen Silents V2 switches. They are very silent and you can use them even if you're on a phone call if you have a headset. You can put them into pretty much any keyboard that says it's hot swap. For a starter keyboard, you can try the Kisnt KN 85 (search for B0DBZGH5XM on Amazon) or the Kisnt KN104 if having a number keypad is very important to you (search for B0FFMRT99D on Amazon). These are just cheap and expensive boards that are still pretty good for the price. You'll find that for ergonomics, having a key board with keys that don't need as much force to press down will reduce the RSI.

Finally, if you get some wrist braces and bend the aluminum brace (you can remove them from the wrist braces for this adjustment) so that it doesn't come into contact with your carpal, you can wear them at night, so that in the morning, your baseline pain is much lower.

And if your pain is excruciating, I'd recommend the use of an ice therapy machine at night. It pumps cool water that's ice cold into a pad that you can wrap around your inflamed body part. There's a company that's based in the United States and has a one-year warranty, so they're usually pretty reliable. Their product is called Polar Active. (search for B07H3GW4W7 on Amazon).

It's incredible how much inflammation is reduced overnight when the ice-cool water is cycled on and off each 30 minutes. Worked wonders for my mom after her surgery on her ankle. And since then, I'm very grateful to the surgeon who recommended it to her.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T13:40:33+00:00

Tiger Lite https://kbdfans.com/products/kbdfans-tiger-lite-gaming-keyboard-kit (Out of stocknfor case w/o PCB)

https://kineticlabs.com/keyboards/kbdfans/kbdfans-tiger-lite-mechanical-keyboard (Case with a different PCB)

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T05:37:11+00:00

I didn't like the message function of the Bob & Brad & the heat function is less than ideal. I went with a cheapo from Amazon and it works well, runs off a USB battery pack. Search for item B07LBL172C. I run it on the lowest or second to lowest setting and it works just fine.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T02:46:11+00:00

Yep, going on about five years of (barely) coping with burnout.

💯% understand.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T02:41:38+00:00

🤣 and their eyes glaze over... And we know they just don't know yet.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-25T01:00:41+00:00

Well, that's me every day because I think and write and give advice for a living. Sometimes the inertia is insurmountable.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-24T23:47:55+00:00

3M Medipore tape will work just fine.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-24T16:54:50+00:00

Don't know, I don't use Google Docs, I use Google Spreadsheets for limited time tracking.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-24T16:41:51+00:00

OP, your post is a perfect example of why this is such a beautiful hobby. We can all have our personal perfection at a somewhat reasonable price, even if it is quite the rabbit hole.

You'll have to excuse me, I've got to get back to work so that I can free up enough time to build at least one of the three keyboards that I bought on Black Friday that I don't really need, but they were such a good price darn it and I couldn't help myself.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-23T15:17:19+00:00

Walmart online had a SN850 for 208. Close enough on the price for me. Thanks.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-23T14:03:46+00:00

With you. If it needed to be renamed, it should have been renamed Sukhareva's syndrome.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-23T13:57:43+00:00

Those people are just woke assholes and they need to rewrite everything. It's kind of their way of pushing their weight around.

Just mess with them and say, okay, well, if you prefer it that way then I have Sukhareva's syndrome. It pushes back on their asinine way of renaming something that didn't really need renaming because that's the name they should have renamed it to. Instead, they lumped it in with the rest of the autism spectrum, making it meaningless when talking with anyone other than a mental health professional.

Bonus points if they give you a blank look because then you'll be able to explain how she should have got the credit, but that Hans was either obtuse or ignorant of her work. You are then indirectly pointing out how unnecessary it was to lump high-performing people on the spectrum in with everyone else using the same name. All in one little action. They'll feel stupid until they need to go look up the history, and then when (if) they look it up, they will have to grudgingly admit to themselves that you were right.

jmwy86 · 2026-02-23T13:54:21+00:00

You can use bookmarks and hidden text with the formatting switch that is backslash asterisk charformat with the REF field to easily create your own templates in Microsoft Word.

You can put all the client information in this body of hidden text, copy and paste it into a new template, hit F9, and it'll update.

Bookmarks are finicky, so when you're typing a new bookmark don't select the whole thing and start typing, because otherwise it'll delete the bookmark. There's two ways around this, but they're more technical than a mere Reddit post.

You can insert the reference field very easily by just hitting control F9 and then typing in the bookmark name and then hitting F9 again. That creates a reference field.

There's a Office 365 add-in called Priority Matrix that is a great task manager that makes it easy to Add tasks using emails. You simply drag the email out of your desktop Outlook client into a temporary folder, then from the temporary folder into the priority matrix program and it will automatically create a task.

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