Typing with RSI

Dictation for RSI: type less, say more

This page is for people whose hands hurt when they type. It's an honest map of the tools that take keystrokes off your hands — including two we don't make. Short version: Talon Voice for hands-free coding, SuperDictate for prose, the free built-ins to test the water, Dragon if you need deep command-and-control and have $699.

The problem

Every email costs keystrokes you'd rather keep

A knowledge-work day is mostly typing that nobody calls typing. Email. Slack threads. Meeting notes. A PR description here, a 600-word doc there, a dozen prompts into an AI chat. None of it is the "real" work, and all of it lands on the same two hands. A 500-word email is roughly 3,000 keypresses. If your wrists, elbows, or fingers are already complaining, that volume is what keeps the complaint going.

The standard advice — breaks, an ergonomic setup, a better keyboard — is about typing more safely. Dictation is the other lever: typing less. Most of what you write in a day is ordinary prose, and ordinary prose can be spoken. To be clear about what dictation is and isn't: it reduces typing load. It does not treat or heal RSI, and nothing on this page is medical advice.

What changes

What good dictation actually changes

People who write by voice every day, with sore hands, converge on the same three requirements. The trigger has to be near-frictionless — if starting a dictation means reaching for the mouse and clicking through a UI, your hands pay a toll every single time. It has to work in every app, because a tool that covers your email client but not your editor sends you back to the keyboard exactly when you wanted relief. And it has to hold up over long-form text, not just one-line demos — a 1,000-word doc exposes punctuation handling and drift that a quick test hides.

SuperDictate is built around those three. One global hotkey, talk, and the text appears wherever your cursor is — Gmail, Slack, VS Code, Notion, a PR description, an AI prompt. It's the closest most people get to hands-free typing: one keypress, then your voice does the rest. macOS 13+ and Windows 10/11, one license for both.

The honest toolbox

Talon for code, SuperDictate for prose, and where the others fit

If you need to write code by voice, use Talon Voice. We mean that. The core app is free on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it does things we don't attempt: voice command grammars, custom noise inputs, eye-tracking mouse control, Python scripting. Josh Comeau, who developed cubital tunnel syndrome in both elbows, runs his whole development workflow on Talon plus an eye tracker. The trade-off is the learning curve — Talon is command-first ("Talon does no transcribing by default," as one long-time user puts it), and you'll invest hours in a phonetic alphabet and command vocabulary before it feels natural. If that's your path, start with our guide to coding by voice.

Here's the pattern the RSI community keeps landing on: Talon for commands, a separate dictation app for prose. Talon's own wiki notes its dictation mode "may be slow and may not work in some applications." That open slot — email, docs, Slack, PR descriptions, AI prompts — is exactly the job SuperDictate is built for. Hotkey, talk, done. There's no command vocabulary to memorize; you can dictate in the first minute.

Try the free built-ins first — genuinely. Apple Voice Control and Windows Voice Typing cost nothing and are fine for short, occasional dictation. Their limits show up at exactly the volume an RSI user needs: long-form text and technical vocabulary. One developer with RSI dictated "maxpou dot fr" into Apple's tool, got "Mexborough blue don't ever ever," and gave up after four hours. If the built-ins are enough for you, stop there and keep your money. We rank them honestly in our Mac dictation roundup.

Dragon Professional remains the institutional default — it's what most university disability offices hand out — and its command-and-control and correction features run deeper than ours. It's also $699, Windows-only, and the Mac version was discontinued in October 2018 (verified June 2026). If budget allows and you need full voice control of a Windows machine, it's a legitimate pick. We go deeper on the Dragon alternative page.

Privacy

You'll dictate things you'd never paste into a web form

Once your voice replaces your keyboard, your dictation becomes everything: the message to your doctor about your wrist, the note to HR, the client doc under NDA, the half-formed idea at 11pm. Cloud dictation uploads that audio to someone else's server. SuperDictate doesn't. Your audio never leaves your computer — the speech model runs on your device, and it works in airplane mode.

The optional AI polish step — cleaning up filler words, tightening punctuation — is text-only and off by default. When you turn it on, it runs through local Ollama or an API key you bring. Your words, your data path.

Questions

Honest answers for sore hands