Last week a client sent me a tricky question over email, the kind where you have to explain a decision, not just say yes or no. Old way: stare at the reply box, type three sentences, delete two, retype, reread, send. Call it four or five minutes for something that isn't complicated. It takes effort, not skill. This time I held a key, said my answer out loud the way I'd explain it to someone sitting across the table, and let go. A clean paragraph was already sitting in the reply box, punctuation fixed. I read it once and sent it. Twenty seconds. The gap is how bodies work. Talking is a skill you've had since childhood. Typing is one most of us still fake with two fingers. The software has finally caught up to it.
How it worksIt's not new. Wispr Flow and VoiceType already do this well, and plenty of people pay a monthly fee for them. I built my own because I wanted my own version of it, and because giving it away felt more useful than charging you for something you can already buy elsewhere. Hold a key, Right Option by default or whatever key you set, talk, and let go. In the second or two it takes, Fala sends what you said off to get cleaned up, filler words gone, punctuation fixed, and types it out wherever your cursor already is. Slack, Gmail, Notion, your code editor, a Google Doc, it doesn't know or care which. It edits too. Select a paragraph you already wrote and dictate an instruction instead of new text, say "make this shorter" or "make this sound less formal," and Fala rewrites it in place. Hold a modifier key along with your dictation key and it applies one of four built-in styles instead: casual, professional, a clean AI prompt, or a longer write-up. You can rename any of them. Why I'm giving it awayBefore I sent this to you, I went through Fala assuming it was broken and tried to prove it. It locks its own files so only your user account can read them. Your OpenAI key sits encrypted in your system's own keychain, not a plain text file. Fala keeps 90 days of dictation history by default, you can change that number or turn history off. A Privacy tab spells out, in plain language, what stays on your machine and what leaves it. No servers of mine sit in between, your voice goes straight to OpenAI on your own key, and if you'd rather keep everything local, you can point Fala at Whisper and Ollama instead and skip the cloud. My wife has been using it for months. My son spent a weekend trying to break the Windows version on his own PC and told me exactly where it failed. If it wasn't good enough for the two of them, I wasn't putting it in front of you either. There's no subscription and no trial that expires without warning. You bring your own OpenAI API key, the same kind you'd use for any AI tool, and Fala uses it directly. A few dollars of credit covers months of normal use, and that's the entire cost. I make nothing from you using this.
If you spend real hours a week typing things you could just as easily say, try Fala for a week. If it doesn't save you time, delete it. You'll have lost nothing but the two minutes it took to install. Mac needs Apple Silicon, M1 through M4, and opens straight away with no security warnings. Windows works too, it's a beta, so you might see a SmartScreen warning on first run, click "More info," then "Run anyway." Talk soon, Mikkel P.S. I'd like to know what you think after a real week of using it. Email me at [email protected] and tell me what's broken or what surprised you. I read all of it.
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