Notes on voice, thought and privacy
Essays on dictation as a craft, working out loud, and building software that keeps your words on your machine. Written by the one person who makes Clabrate.
A perfect transcript is a bad transcript
Our speech model hears every um you say — and types it faithfully. Why what you want was never what you said.
A place to put a thought down
Sticky pads that float over your whole desktop, and an assistant that writes on them with you. On giving ideas somewhere to land.
I built a typing test and lost to my own voice
One night chasing combos and personal bests on our new typing test — until the speak-it-back round beat my best run three times over.
I turned the Odyssey into a stick fight you shout at
Shout POW and watch the hit land: a free Greek-armor stick fight driven by your voice — nothing you yell leaves the tab.
Put the browser on the left
Clabrate can move your windows now — by voice, by name, by saved layout. On why saying a place beats aiming at one.
The assistant was always the main character
Everyone meets Clabrate as a dictation app. The reveal was in the name the whole time.
Free voice tools shouldn't need your voice
Why a private mic test and browser recorder can be free without making your voice the price of admission.
Why dictation eats your first word
The chopped first word isn't your diction and isn't the model — the mic was asleep. What's happening, and the honest trade that fixes it.
How to write with your mouth
Dictation isn't typing with extra steps — it's explaining. The small set of habits that turn messy speech into clean first drafts.
Northern lights, and the little sky in the corner
A July 4 aurora chase, and why the glow in Clabrate's HUD just got the name people actually call it.
Your voice never needed the cloud
Why cloud dictation became normal, what changed on modern Macs, and the questions to ask before trusting any voice app.
Thinking has two speeds
Fast flow and slow, halting thought both matter. The pause is the work, and most voice tools punish it.
Don't interrupt your train of thought
Why typing breaks fragile ideas, what working memory costs, and how voice capture keeps the whole thought intact.