# About Name: AudioPen Description: Your voice, written your way. URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog # Navigation Menu - Go to app: https://app.audiopen.ai # Blog Posts ## Maybe you should be doing less Published: 2026-04-25 Tags: thinking, tools for thought Tag URLs: thinking (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/thinking), tools for thought (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/tools-for-thought) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/maybe-you-should-be-doing-less Everyone's searching for the perfect creative environment. The right playlist. The right coffee shop. The right lighting. They're looking in the wrong place. Your best ideas don't come from stimulation. They come from the absence of it. **Boredom is where creativity lives.** ![A woman walking through a forest](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/gemini-generated-image-26-1777102158737-compressed.png) When you're stuck in traffic, your mind wanders. When you're folding laundry, solutions appear. When you're taking a shower, creativity surges. When you're walking without a podcast, connections form. The void creates the value. ## Your subconscious needs space to work. Constant input doesn't feed creativity, it starves it. Every notification is a thought interrupted. Every distraction is a connection lost. Silicon Valley figured this out years ago. Google's 20% time. 3M's 15% rule. Slack was built during office downtime. Twitter started as a side project during lunch breaks. The pattern is clear: breakthrough ideas emerge when the pressure is off. Your brain has two modes. Focused attention and diffuse thinking. Focused attention solves known problems. Diffuse thinking finds new ones worth solving. Most people live in focused mode. They optimize the wrong thing. The magic happens in the space between thoughts. Watch what happens when you remove stimulation for 24 hours. No podcasts during commutes. No music during workouts. No scrolling during breaks. Your mind fills the silence with signal. ## Meditation isn't about emptying your mind. It's about creating capacity. ![A person meditating](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/gemini-generated-image-25-1777098764391-compressed.png) The most successful people aren't the busiest. They're the ones who protect their boredom like it's their most valuable asset. Because it is. Every mundane moment is creative potential in disguise. The shower thoughts. The 3am realizations. The ideas that hit during your commute. None of them come from trying harder. Action doesn't just create motion. It creates the conditions for breakthrough. But not the action everyone thinks. **The most productive thing you can do is sometimes nothing at all.** --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## Voice Typing on Mac: What If You Just Stopped Typing? Published: 2026-03-16 Tags: AudioPen for Mac, Voice Typing, Use Cases Tag URLs: AudioPen for Mac (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/audiopen-for-mac), Voice Typing (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/voice-typing), Use Cases (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/use-cases) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/voice-typing-on-mac-with-audiopen ![MacBook](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-7-1773637401819-compressed.png) **I haven't typed most of what I've written in the last month.** But I [built](https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/how-i-built-audiopen) the tool I'm using, so maybe that's expected. But hear me out. I'm [Louis](https://louispereira.xyz), the founder of AudioPen. For the past month, roughly 95% of everything I would normally type, I've spoken instead. Emails. Slack messages. WhatsApp. YouTube comment replies. Instructions to my coding agent. Prompts to Claude and ChatGPT. **Speaking lets me give them far more** [**context**](https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/voice-to-notes-with-audiopen) than I'd ever bother to type out. **I hold down a hotkey, talk** to AudioPen on my MacBook Air, let go, and **perfectly formatted text appears wherever my cursor is**. I never leave the app I'm working in. But what I'm doing with AudioPen isn't just traditional dictation. It's much more than that. Traditional dictation merely gives you a transcript. Every "um," every false start, every abandoned sentence. Every repeated phrase. All written exactly as you said it. And as you know, **you don't always know exactly what you want to say when you say it**. **AudioPen for Mac doesn't just transcribe. It rewrites.** I speak naturally, and what appears at my cursor is **polished text in a style I've chosen**. - I have a **custom email style** that captures my own voice, so every email sounds like me on a good writing day. - I have a **blog writing style** that lets me draft blogs just like this one, using just my voice. - I have an **LLM prompt style** that I use to talk to ChatGPT or Claude. - I have a **casual message style** that I use for WhatsApp or Slack. - I even have a **custom coding editor style** that I use when I communicate with Cursor or Claude Code All these styles do much more than give me a transcript to clean up. They give me something close to a finished product, and in some cases, they give me the finished product itself. * * * ## We've Had Voice-to-Text for Decades. Nobody Uses It. Dragon NaturallySpeaking launched in 1997. Siri came to Mac in 2016. Apple's built-in dictation has been free forever. Almost everyone still types everything. Because all of those tools stop at transcription. Voice typing that actually replaces a keyboard needs two things: **Stay invisible.** No app to open. Press a key where you're already working, talk, text appears. **Sound like writing, not speech.** Not a transcript. A rewrite. That second one is what AI has finally made possible. * * * ## How AudioPen for Mac Works AudioPen started as a web app. You record a thought, it gives you back structured text. But the web app lives in a browser tab. You have to go to it. **AudioPen for Mac is different. It lives at the system level, wherever your cursor is**. Gmail, Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Jira, a search bar. It auto pastes what it creates from your speech. You never leave what you're doing. ![A Mac keyboard using AudioPen](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-8-1773639890266-compressed.png) AudioPen for Mac comes with 3 modes: ### 1\. Hold to Talk Press and hold the hotkey. Talk. Release. Clean text appears at your cursor. Transcription happens entirely on your device. Your audio never leaves your Mac. This is for quick replies, search queries, Slack messages. Anything where you know what you want to say and just don't want to type it. ### 2\. Double-Tap for AI Rewrite Double-tap the hotkey. Talk for as long as you need. Tap again. AudioPen transcribes locally, then sends the transcript (not the audio) to an AI model that rewrites it in a style you've chosen. Business email. Casual memo. Your own custom voice. Polished text appears at your cursor a few seconds later. No data is stored on AudioPen's servers. ### 3\. Triple-Tap for Notes Mode Triple-tap and you're in classic AudioPen. Speak your thought and it gets saved to your notes library, processed and structured the same way it would on the web, synced across all your devices. For the idea that hits you mid-workflow and doesn't have a destination yet. Try AudioPen for Mac * * * ## The "I Can't Go Back" Moment There's a pattern I keep seeing among the early users of AudioPen for Mac. Within the first week, something clicks. You're halfway through typing a Slack message and you realize you've been doing this the hard way. You hold down the key, say what you were going to type, and watch it appear. Cleaner than what you were writing. In a fraction of the time. Then you try it on an email you've been putting off for two days because you couldn't get the tone right. You talk through what you want to say, and [AudioPen gives](https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/surprising-uses-of-audiopen) you back something you're actually ready to send. That's when the switch happens. Not because the technology is impressive, but because you realize typing was never the work. **Thinking was the work. Typing just made the thinking harder by adding a second layer of effort**: finding the right words, in the right order, with the right spelling, in real time. Remove that layer and the thinking flows. After that, **typing feels like handwriting a letter when there's a printer right there**. * * * ## The Math That Matters Most people type around 40 words per minute when composing. Most people speak at 120 to 150. You're cutting text-creation time by more than half. And we haven't even considered editing time. **AudioPen does the transcription and editing in one fell swoop**. Got a complex report to write? You give AudioPen your messy thoughts, it gives you a perfect draft. * * * ## What This Actually Means AudioPen for Mac transcribes what you say with top-tier fidelity. But that's table stakes. **What makes it different is the layer on top: it rewrites what you said in a style of your choice**, so the output isn't a rough transcript you need to spend ten minutes cleaning up. It's something very close to a finished product. A client email that sounds polished and professional? Talk the way you normally talk. A legal memo that reads like a lawyer wrote it, even though you were speaking in plain English? Pick the style, speak your thoughts, done. A book you're writing in a specific voice? Set it once and talk your way through it. A formal company memo, but you think in fragments like every other human being? Speak the fragments. Get back the memo. **AudioPen for Mac doesn't just make you faster at things you already type. It makes you willing to write things you otherwise wouldn't.** The gap between how you think and how you write has always been the hard part. AudioPen closes it. Try AudioPen for Mac --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## How to Draft Emails by Talking (And Have Them Sound Like You) Published: 2026-03-15 Tags: Writing Styles, Emails, How To Tag URLs: Writing Styles (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/writing-styles), Emails (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/emails), How To (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/how-to) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/draft-emails-with-your-voice ![A girl writing emails on her computer](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-6-1773624974116-compressed.png) Nadia has two custom styles saved in AudioPen. One is "casual email." The other is "business memo." She picks which one after she's done talking, not before. Because the email she thought was going to be a quick reply sometimes turns out to be a five-paragraph explanation of a financial restructuring. She doesn't know which kind of email it is until she hears herself say it. That's the thing nobody tells you about drafting emails by voice: it doesn't just save time. It changes what you say. ## The Real Bottleneck Isn't Your Typing Speed Here's what actually happens when most people write an important email. They type a sentence. Read it back. Delete four words. Retype them. Second-guess the tone. Nine minutes later, they've produced three paragraphs that sound like a LinkedIn post nobody asked for. The bottleneck isn't the keyboard. It's the editing loop. Every sentence gets scrutinized before the next one exists, so your full thought never comes out. You're polishing fragments. Speaking bypasses this. You can't backspace spoken words. So you say the whole thing, messy and all over the place, and the full shape of your thinking emerges. Then you clean it up. That's a fundamentally different order of operations, and it produces better emails. Not just faster. Better. Because the version of you who rambles for two minutes hits the real reason around the ninety-second mark. That reason would never have survived the typing-and-deleting loop. ## The Vomit Draft Peter, who ran a company and sat on multiple boards, called his spoken drafts "verbal vomit." Disgusting. Also perfectly accurate. His method: open AudioPen, list the three or four points he needed to cover, then just talk through them. No outline. AudioPen gave him back a clean, organized version. He'd paste it into his email client and tweak from there. He wasn't dictating. Dictation is performance. Peter was thinking out loud, and AudioPen was catching the output. He used this especially for emails where tone mattered. Paradoxically, talking produced a more careful email than typing, because he could hear whether something landed as he said it. ## Your Voice, Your Style ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773625387726-compressed.png) Here's where it gets interesting. [AudioPen is](https://audiopen.ai/blog/voice-to-notes-with-audiopen) a voice-to-structured-text tool, not a voice-to-email tool. Email is one use case. Notes, memos, journal entries, meeting recaps, blog drafts, all of it works the same way. You talk, it structures. **But the part that makes the biggest difference for email is custom styles. You can create your own output style inside AudioPen, trained on how you actually write at your best**. Every email you draft by voice comes out sounding like your best emails, the ones you spent twenty minutes carefully composing on a good day. Except now it takes two minutes. This is what Nadia figured out. She saved her two styles because each one captured a specific version of her voice. The casual one sounds like her. The business one sounds like her. Not like a template. Not like AI. Like Nadia on a good writing day, every time. ## Why the Mess Is the Point The obvious objection: "If I just ramble into a microphone, won't my email be incoherent?" **Yes. Your recording will be incoherent. That's raw material, not the finished product.** You say "okay so the thing is, we really need to push the deadline because, well actually there are two reasons..." and AudioPen turns it into a clean two-paragraph email with numbered points and a professional sign-off. You said all of it. You just said it wrapped in filler with three false starts. AudioPen unwrapped it. Transcription gives you every "um" and false start. Useless. Heavy AI rewriting gives you something that sounds like a robot. Also useless. **AudioPen sits in the sweet spot: fix the grammar, remove the filler, keep your voice, write in a style of your choice.** ## The Part That Actually Matters There's a pattern in how people describe this workflow that goes deeper than productivity. Henrik, a linguistics professor with ADHD, said it gave him "greater autonomy and peace of mind." Writing emails used to be the most stressful part of his job, not because he didn't know what to say, but because the act of typing drained him. He'd procrastinate on important replies for days. Now he talks them into AudioPen and they're done in minutes. Robert, a retired pastor in his seventies, writes regularly to a young man who is incarcerated. The replies he used to type were exhausting and never matched the depth of the letters he received. Now he dictates his responses into AudioPen paragraph by paragraph. The replies are longer, warmer, and more him. **None of these people use AudioPen because it's faster. They use it because it makes them capable of communication they were avoiding.** Typing was the thing standing in the way. ## How to Start ![a man drafting an email by talking](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-5-1773584749959-compressed.png) Pick one email you've been putting off. Open AudioPen. Talk for two minutes about what you want to say. Don't perform. Just explain it like you'd tell a friend. Read the output. Paste it into Gmail or Outlook. Edit for thirty seconds. Hit send. You just wrote the email you've been avoiding for 48 hours in under three minutes. Do this three times and you won't go back. Not because it's better technology, but because you'll realize you were never bad at writing emails. You were bad at typing them. * * * _Names have been changed to protect privacy._ --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## Brain Dumps with AudioPen: Make Sense of Your Thoughts Published: 2026-03-15 Tags: AudioPen Blog, Use Cases, brain dumps Tag URLs: AudioPen Blog (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/audiopen-blog), Use Cases (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/use-cases), brain dumps (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/brain-dumps) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/brain-dumps-with-audiopen ![Brain dumps with AudioPen](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-2-1773581211043-compressed.png) ## Your Head Is Full. That's the Problem. A medical researcher I spoke to starts every morning the same way. She laces up her shoes, puts in her AirPods, and has a one way talk with [AudioPen](https://audiopen.ai) for ten minutes while she walks. She's not on the phone. She's not listening to a podcast. She's narrating the inside of her own head, out loud, into AudioPen. By the time she gets home, the three research ideas that were tangled together have separated. The grant deadline she kept forgetting about is now a line item. The email she owed someone is drafted. And the conversation with a colleague that had been gnawing at her turns out to be nothing. She calls it a brain dump. **It's the most underrated productivity habit I've come across, and almost nobody does it**. * * * ## The Bucket Problem Your brain is not a filing cabinet. It doesn't store a thought and move on. It stores a thought and then pings you about it, repeatedly, until you do something with it. Psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect: **unfinished tasks take up more mental space than finished ones**. This is why you remember the email you forgot to send but not the one you sent yesterday. **Your brain treats open loops like alarms that won't stop ringing**. **A brain dump works because it closes the loop**. You say the thing out loud. It lands in a note. Your subconscious gets the signal: _handled_. The alarm shuts off. That's the whole trick. Not productivity. Not organization. Just: your head is full. Talk until it isn't. * * * ## Why Typing Doesn't Work Most people try to brain dump by typing. This is a mistake. **The moment your fingers touch a keyboard, the editing reflex kicks in**. You start a sentence, delete half of it, rewrite it, wonder if that's really the right word. You check your email. You come back. You've forgotten what you were saying. ![a lady talking to AudioPen](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/featured-image-600-x-404-1773582024132-compressed.png) Speaking doesn't have this problem. You can't unsay a sentence halfway through. The filter stays off. The mess comes out fast, which is exactly the point. * * * ## What the Right Tool Actually Needs **Zero friction to start.** If it takes more than two taps, you'll talk yourself out of it. **No structure during capture.** The moment you see a form field or a dropdown menu, you're editing, not dumping. **Some structure after.** A ten-minute recording is useless if you have to re-listen to the whole thing. You need something messy on the way in and clean on the way out. This is what AudioPen does. You tap, you talk, you stop. It gives you back a structured note from your stream of consciousness. You read it once, pull out the one or two things that matter, and move on. * * * ## The Part Nobody Talks About Here's what the productivity crowd misses: **brain dumps aren't just for tasks. They're for feelings.** A linguistics professor with ADHD told me that dumping his email backlog into AudioPen, before sending a single reply, was worth the subscription on its own. The core content of the emails hadn't changed. But they were out of his head and into text, and that made them manageable. A retired meditation teacher near Chicago uses it for what he calls "inquiry." Fifteen minutes of spoken reflection every morning. He's not trying to be productive. He's trying to understand what he's experiencing. The summary he gets back is a mirror, not a to-do list. There's a version of the brain dump that's closer to therapy than task management. You talk until the pressure drops. The note you get back is proof that the noise in your head had actual content. It wasn't just static. That's weirdly reassuring. * * * ## How to Start Without Overthinking It ![a man capturing a note with AudioPen](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/audiopen-featured-image-4-1773582342204-compressed.png) **Pick a trigger.** Morning walk. End of workday. Right after a stressful meeting. Any moment where your head tends to be full. **Set a timer for five minutes.** Most people's first brain dump runs three to four minutes before they feel empty. **Talk, don't list.** Don't enumerate. Narrate. Let it be ugly. "I keep thinking about what Sarah said in that meeting, and I'm not sure if she meant it as criticism or just... anyway, the real problem is Thursday's deadline because I haven't even started the..." That's a brain dump. **Read the output, not the transcript.** If you're using [AudioPen, read](https://audiopen.ai/blog/voice-to-notes-with-audiopen) the cleaned-up version. **Do it again tomorrow.** One session clears your head. A daily practice changes how you think. You start each morning lighter because you trust that yesterday's loose ends were captured somewhere. ## The Note Is a Bonus A retired business mentor I know records his thoughts the moment he wakes up at 3 a.m. with an idea. He used to scribble on paper but couldn't read his own handwriting in the morning. Now he speaks into his phone for two minutes and goes back to sleep. The idea is captured. His brain lets go. That's all a brain dump needs to do. **Your head is full. Talk to AudioPen until it isn't.** The note AudioPen creates is just a bonus. --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## The Surprising Ways People Are Using AudioPen Today Published: 2026-03-15 Tags: Building in Public, AudioPen Blog, Use Cases Tag URLs: Building in Public (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/building-in-public), AudioPen Blog (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/audiopen-blog), Use Cases (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/use-cases) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/surprising-uses-of-audiopen There's a thing I keep seeing with a lot of SaaS tools – call it the **Vending Machine Problem**. ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773576643678-compressed.png) **You build a product with one obvious input-output pair**: voice goes in, meeting notes come out. Or prompt goes in, TikTok ready video comes out. That's the pitch. That's the App Store listing. And it's fine. It works. People buy it for that reason. **But the moment real humans get their hands on it, the machine starts dispensing things you never stocked**. People find use cases they swear by, even if you never imagined them. When I [built](https://audiopen.ai/blog/how-i-built-audiopen) AudioPen, I was surprised to see the range of things people used it for. Here are a few: * * * ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773576844252-compressed.png) ### The Complex Email Dictating Software Engineer **Nate is a software engineer. He doesn't use voice-to-text for meetings at all. He uses it almost exclusively for email.** He jots down bullet points of what he wants to cover, then — his words, not mine — " **vomits a speech**" about them into the app. Out comes an email draft he can clean up in his mail client. He does this five or six times a week. **His workflow isn't meeting notes. It's a drafting accelerator**. ### The CEO who can't record meetings Stefan is a CEO who frequently can't legally record his meetings. **So immediately after walking out of the room, he dictates everything he can remember**: who said what, what was decided, what needs follow-up. It's a memory protocol — captured while the signal is still fresh, before the brain starts compressing and discarding. AudioPen captures everything and makes sense of things, so they're ready to be referred to in the future. ### The filmmaker who writes letters in a different language **An 82-year-old Czech filmmaker is using a AudioPen to write letters in English to his friends in Scotland**. He grew up in socialist Czechoslovakia with almost no access to foreign languages. He speaks into his phone in Czech and gets back English prose he describes as "absolutely perfect", better than anything Google Translate ever gave him. His name is Karel, and he is not the target user on anyone's landing page. ### The Peruvian Shamanism Seminar Organizer **Veronica runs a small business in Switzerland organizing seminars on Peruvian shamanism**. She knows the legends. She's lived inside them. But when she sat down to turn those stories into materials her students could follow, the page stayed blank. Not because she had nothing to say. Because she had too much, and no clean way to get it out. So she started talking instead of typing. She speaks her thoughts into AudioPen, scattered, layered, mid-stream, and lets the app do the structural work she couldn't. It untangles her reflections into something a reader can follow without losing the feel of what she actually meant. ### The Son who Writes Stories for his Mother Then there's Marc. **He records casual updates about his day while driving and sends them to his mother as structured stories**. He could just send a voice note. But he wants two things a voice note doesn't give you: a chance to review before sending, and a readable format on the other end. He's choosing text over voice _for the recipient's sake_. * * * ## The Pattern Worth Naming I'd call this **Use Case Drift** — what happens when a product's actual value diverges from its marketed one. Not in a bad way. The product isn't broken. People aren't misusing it. They're discovering adjacent utility that the maker never anticipated. Meeting notes are the front door. But email drafting, memory capture, cross-language communication, relationship maintenance — those are the side entrances where the interesting traffic flows. The instinct, if you're building the product, is to chase these use cases. Make features for each one. Build dedicated flows. But that usually kills the thing that made the drift possible in the first place: simplicity. A voice input and a text output. **The narrower the tool, the wider the interpretation.** * * * ## What This Actually Means for Builders **If you're making software, your App Store description is a hypothesis. Your users are running the experiment.** And the results will look nothing like your assumptions — which is either terrifying or the most useful data you'll ever get, depending on your temperament. None of these use cases — the email vomiter, the post-meeting memory dump, the 82-year-old Czech-to-English translator, the Peruvian Shamanism seminar creator, the mother-in-law story sender — would survive a product planning meeting. All of them are more interesting than "meeting notes." **I suppose the lesson is that the best features are sometimes the ones you never build. You just leave enough room for people to find them.** Which is a nice way of saying: sometimes the smartest product decision is doing less and getting lucky. * * * _All names have been changed to protect user privacy._ --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## Voice to Notes: Convert fuzzy thought to clear text with AudioPen Published: 2026-03-15 Tags: Use Cases, Transcription, Writing Styles Tag URLs: Use Cases (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/use-cases), Transcription (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/transcription), Writing Styles (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/writing-styles) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/voice-to-notes-with-audiopen **Robert is 76 years old**. He spent 50 years as a pastor, and for most of those years he had a secretary. He'd dictate his thoughts from the books he was reading, she'd type them up, format and restructure them well, and that became the foundation of everything he preached. A clean system. It worked for decades. ![A pastor reading out his notes to his secretary. ](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773567438109-compressed.png) But in 2026, he doesn't have a secretary anymore. **He has AudioPen.** It listens to what he says. It makes sense of it. It restructures it if needed, and **rewrites it in a writing style of his choice**. In one fell swoop, he goes from fuzzy thought to clear text, just by talking to his phone. No secretary needed. * * * ## Transformation, Not Transcription Speech-to-text has existed since the 90s. **But what most [people](https://audiopen.ai/blog/surprising-uses-of-audiopen) actually need is not transcription. It is transformation**. Taking the messy, half-formed thoughts, and turning them into something you could use. **That's the gap most voice-to-notes tools still don't close.** They give you exactly what you said. Every "um," every false start, every sentence you abandoned halfway through because your brain outran your mouth. They assume that what you want to say before you say it. **Raw transcription is useful if you're recording a meeting and need a legal record.** **It is almost completely useless if you're trying to think**. * * * ## AudioPen – A Detangler For Your Thoughts ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773570081404-compressed.png) Priya is a medical researcher in India. Every morning she puts in her AirPods, goes for a walk, and does what she calls a " **brain dump**" — she talks about whatever's on her mind. Sometimes it's a research problem. Sometimes it's a deadline she's anxious about. Sometimes it's both at once, tangled together. A mashup of fuzzy thoughts, exactly the kind of thing AudioPen excels at making sense of. **Priya doesn't need a transcript of her thoughts during that walk. She needs the signal extracted from the noise**. She needs the three ideas worth keeping, cleaned up, structured, ready to drop into Obsidian where they become the seeds of research papers and Substack essays. **She calls AudioPen a "detangler for her thoughts."** That's a better name for what voice-to-notes should be. Yes, she could go to something like ChatGPT: Paste in a transcript and ask it to clean things up. But what you get back sounds like ChatGPT. Besides, it adds unnecessary complexity to what should be an elegant workflow. So she uses AudioPen. One click of a button. And she can speak. Another click, and she has her thoughts restructured, ready for future reference. Voice-to-notes, but on steroids. * * * ## **Meeting Debriefs Done Differently** ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773570204858-compressed.png) **Derrick runs a company and sits on multiple boards.** He spends his days in meetings he often can't legally record. So he developed a habit: **the moment a meeting ends, he pulls out his phone and dictates everything he wants to remember** — who said what, what was decided, what was left hanging. **AudioPen turns that stream-of-consciousness debrief into a structured memory protocol he could actually reference later**. No notes during the meeting. No awkward laptop in the corner. Just a five-minute verbal dump afterward that captured more than most people's handwritten notes ever did. **Voice-to-notes in a useful, repeatable form.** No fluff, no fuss. * * * ## The Tool Has to Disappear Two things kill a voice-to-notes tool faster than anything else: if it can't understand you properly, or if it rewrites your voice note transcript in a mechanical, AI generated style. AudioPen has both those bases covered. ### 1\. AudioPen perfectly understands any accent **Priya chose AudioPen specifically because it handles her Indian accent.** If the transcription is wrong, nothing downstream works — the whole pipeline breaks at step one. Folks from all over the planet swear by AudioPen, irrespective of their preferred language, or accents. AudioPen uses the best speech to text models available, and will continue to do so as they evolve. But even with perfect transcription, the tool fails if it flattens your voice. That's where AudioPen solves a problem that most other voice-to-notes tools don't. ### 2\. AudioPen lets you adjust the intensity of its rewrites AI generated writing sucks. It's almost immediately recognizable, and the universe doesn't need more AI slop. Handcrafted writing almost always reads better. But the solution doesn't have to be one or the other. There is a middle ground. AudioPen excels at it. Besides letting you define a writing style, **it also lets you adjust the intensity in which that writing style is applied.** ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773568246240-compressed.png) Want something that **just corrects your grammatical errors, but leaves your prose intact**? AudioPen can do it. Want something that completely restructures your text to make sure that it flows better? AudioPen can do it. Want something that just mimics the style of your voice based on the sample of writing that you've given it? AudioPen can do that too. **The sweet spot is restructuring without excessive rewriting.** Keeping your phrases, your tone, your specific way of putting things, but organizing them into something coherent. **With AudioPen, you can choose exactly the level of rewrite your notes are subjected to.** You talk, you get something useful, you move on. AudioPen does exactly that. **It's deceptively simple to use. Give it a whirl.** Try AudioPen * * * _All names in this post have been changed to protect privacy._ --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## How I built AudioPen Published: 2026-02-24 Tags: Building in Public, AudioPen Blog, Use Cases Tag URLs: Building in Public (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/building-in-public), AudioPen Blog (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/audiopen-blog), Use Cases (https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/tag/use-cases) URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/how-i-built-audiopen I'll start off with a confession: I built AudioPen by accident. ![An image of me building AudioPen in the early days](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/img20230805181823-01-1773560753645-compressed.jpeg) I'm [**Louis**](https://x.com/louispereira) and I live in Goa, India. I'm what they call an indie-hacker. In fact, I'm not even that. **I'm a part-time indie-hacker.** During the day, I work with my family business in the offline world. At night, I build assets on the internet. I've dabbled with building things online for years, ever since 2015. But I've never been able to code. I've always tried and given up half way. From 2015 till 2020, all I had were ideas to build things on the internet, but I lacked the skills to bring them to life. Luckily for me, in early 2021, technology caught up with my imagination. ## Discovering Bubble Like most people during the pandemic, I spent quite a lot of time and money on online courses to learn new things. One of those things was [Bubble.io](https://bubble.io). And boy did it pay off. ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773562077293-compressed.png)Bubble's home page (as of March 2026) Bubble may feel antiquated today in 2026. But back in 2021, it was at the bleeding edge of no-code development. For the first time in over half a decade, I had found a tool that molded itself to my ideas, instead of me having to mold my ideas to fit the limitations of all the tools I had tried. And I absolutely loved it. I started experimenting with Bubble, and I built multiple tools just for fun. I'd stay up at night, and just build. Most tools went nowhere. Some of them made it all the way to launch. But most of the ones I launched, failed. A couple, like [Read Something Great](https://readsomethinggreat.com) and [Nicheless](https://nicheless.blog) survived. For the first time in my life, I didn't feel the need to learn how to code. I felt like my ideas had wings. All I had to do was keep building, and I hoped to finally stumble upon an idea that would find mass appeal. * * * ## Half Day Build Hackathon ![Social Preview.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/social-preview-1773572673528-compressed.png) A few months after discovering my love for building with Bubble, I decided to start a hackathon. I called it HalfDayBuild and even bought the halfdaybuild.com domain (which I then forgot to auto-renew, but I'll save that story for another day). The idea was simple: invite a bunch of friends from Twitter, and **each of us would try to turn an idea into revenue within 12 hours on a specific day**. All while live tweeting about our progress. In the initial hackathons, about 30 people joined. But as the months went by, the numbers grew to over 100 participants. People built all sorts of stuff—online courses, SaaS products, even robots they sold online. Simple robots, but robots nonetheless. It was wild to watch. Starting HalfDayBuild is one of the things I'm most proud of myself for. I know it encouraged people to get started in the internet economy, and I'm grateful that I could be a part of their journeys. Besides organizing each HalfDayBuild, I built a bunch of stuff during each hackathon too! **Unsurprisingly, most failed.** They never made any revenue. Some that did, barely made any. But I had a blast. I would build stuff for free all day if I could, but unfortunately for the world, I also have bills to pay. * * * ## My happy accident: Stumbling upon AudioPen In early 2023, OpenAI's APIs were becoming very popular. GPT-3 was the latest at that point, and folks on Twitter were buzzing about it. I hadn't experimented with any AI tools yet, but I wanted to. However, I had so many failed products languishing on domains and servers that I was paying for every month, that the thought of starting something new seemed like a bad idea. **I feared I'd tumble down a rabbit hole, building more products that would only create bills to pay, without generating any revenue**. So that week, I decided to try something different. **I decided to build a bunch of tools and host them on my own website**. Here's a screenshot of that site, which still survives. ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773572905135-compressed.png) **In under a week, I had built five tools**, each one doing something completely unrelated to the others. I was building just to learn, just for fun. As I finished each tool, I shared it on Twitter. I didn't expect anything to come from this. I was still early in my experimentation with AI. However, I was wrong. As I released each tool, people commented, liked, and sometimes retweeted. But when I released **AudioPen** (which was a rudimentary version of the current tool), **it got a lot more love than I expected**. Loads of people commented, saying they could imagine using AudioPen in ways I hadn't even thought of. That made me pay attention. ### HalfDayBuild X AudioPen The next HalfDayBuild was under a week away. I still hadn't found an idea to build, so I thought, why not just go for a full version of AudioPen? I wasn't the target user then, and I didn't fully grasp what people liked about it. But there was something there worth exploring. No other tools were similar because it was early days for AI. I figured, what's the worst that could happen? If nobody likes it, it's fine. I'm used to that already. At least here, my chances of success felt higher than with any other idea I had. So I said, screw it. Let's build. ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773573491865-compressed.png) In the days leading up to the HalfDayBuild, I sat down in Figma and designed a bunch of screens for AudioPen. Design usually takes me a while, so I figured I'd get it out of the way before HalfDayBuild. That way, I could focus purely on building during those 12 hours. The day arrived, and I knew exactly what I wanted to build. I'd already shared some screenshots on Twitter. So, I dove straight into building and live-tweeting about it. ![image.png](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cmlytdywy00hx01xbh5jotqz1/images/image-1773573680645-compressed.png) In under 12 hours, the site was live. A few test users from Twitter trickled in, and I even got my first paying customers. Since that day in March 2023, I've been chipping away at making AudioPen better. This year, I plan to keep at it. I'm still a part time indie-hacker. And I'm still having the time of my life building this thing. I hope you'll give it a try. Try AudioPen --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. --- ## Sample Page Published: 2026-02-23 URL: https://www.audiopen.ai/blog/sample-page This is a page. Notice how there are no elements like author, date, social sharing icons? Yes, this is the page format. You can create a whole website using Superblog if you wish to do so! --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. ---