How I Replaced Three Apps with Whiskers
A developer's story of consolidating dictation, transcription, and AI cleanup into one tool.
Before Whiskers, my dictation workflow looked like this: Apple Dictation for quick notes, Otter.ai for meeting transcriptions, and ChatGPT for cleaning up the mess. Three apps, three subscriptions, three different interfaces. None of them talked to each other.
The breaking point
I was working on a technical spec—dictating into Apple Dictation, copying the garbled output into ChatGPT, waiting for cleanup, then pasting into my editor. Midway through, Dictation crashed and I lost a paragraph. That was the last straw.
What Whiskers replaced
Apple Dictation handled quick input but mangled technical terms. "React hook" became "react hook" (lowercase), "API endpoint" turned into "a.p.i. and point," and anything with camelCase was hopeless.
Otter.ai was decent for longer recordings but required uploading audio to their servers. As someone who dictates notes about client projects, sending that data to a third party never sat well with me.
ChatGPT cleaned up transcripts beautifully, but the copy-paste dance was tedious and broke my flow.
One tool, one workflow
With Whiskers, I press a hotkey, speak, and release. The transcript appears in whatever app I'm working in—cleaned up, punctuated, and with my technical terms intact (thanks to Custom Vocabulary). No uploading, no copy-pasting, no waiting.
The whole process takes seconds instead of minutes, and my words never leave my machine.
The productivity math
Conservatively, I was spending 15 minutes per day on the old workflow. That's over 90 hours per year managing dictation tools instead of doing actual work. Some tools are worth consolidating.