When typing hurts, speak the work.

SnailText is a typing alternative, not medical advice or treatment. If you are managing RSI, carpal tunnel, or tendinitis, see a hand specialist or occupational therapist first. What follows is about the workflow piece — how to keep working while the medical advice does its job.

The advice for RSI is the advice you already know: rest, stretch, ergonomic setup, see a hand specialist. None of it is wrong. All of it assumes you can stop typing long enough for the rest to mean something. For most knowledge workers, that assumption breaks within a week.

Voice dictation is not a cure. It is a way to keep working while the wrist actually gets to heal — or at least to stop trending in the wrong direction. The hours you spend speaking instead of typing are hours the tendons are not loading. Over weeks, that adds up to the kind of rest that pure willpower could not give you.

If you dictate enough, your transcripts will eventually include messages to your doctor, the wording of an insurance claim, conversations about your own diagnosis, notes about what hurts and when. That is not unusual content for someone managing a chronic condition — it is most of the administrative load.

SnailText runs Whisper locally. Audio is processed in RAM and discarded the moment the text is ready. Nothing on disk, nothing transmitted. The transcripts go wherever you paste them; nothing about what you said is logged on our side or anyone else's.

For some people this is incidental. For others — especially people managing conditions they prefer not to broadcast to a third-party transcription service — it is the actual reason to choose local over cloud.

Voice typing removes most of the keystroke load. It does not remove all of it — you will still use the keyboard for editing, navigation, and the parts of the work that are actually code or formatting. The reduction in typing volume is usually 60–80% for writing-heavy work, less for engineering, less still for design.

Dictation has its own ergonomic costs. Long monologues are mentally tiring in a way typing is not. Vocal fatigue is real if you push it eight hours a day. The trick is to use voice for the volume parts and keyboard for the precision parts, in whatever ratio actually rests the body part that is currently complaining.

And accuracy is a real variable. Whisper is good — better than dictation was even three years ago — but it is not perfect, especially on accented English, technical jargon, or quiet speech. You will edit. The question is whether the edit pass is cheaper than the type-from-scratch pass, and for most people the answer is yes.