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Yesterday for the first time, I (am not proud to say) that I screamed my absolute frustration regarding having to use my manual wheelchair. I have moments of anger where I want to rant, but they are relatively few and far between. It is of course incredibly difficult with PSP, and nothing I write should make it sound any easier. I will however remain positive and upbeat and full of gratitude and blessings because what’s the alternative option? And on Friday I found a solve to a big question I’d been asking myself for a while.
In terms of activities that matter to me in daily life, writing is by far the most important. I find typing increasingly hard, both on my mobile phone and on my keyboard, depending on the time of day. I have also started to find dictation on my phone and on my Mac difficult, especially late at night when I’m trying to talk slowly and my voice is soft. It makes simply far too many mistakes. I found an amazing solution that I wanted to share. One for its own sake, and two because it shows that there is still technology that can help us.
I am not going into the bits and bytes of AI. It has advantages and disadvantages as a general point, but this app called Flow has changed my life in writing.
It picks up on my voice even at a whisper, and I genuinely mean a whisper. It is 00:38 in the morning and I am talking incredibly slowly into my computer, which is the usual distance away from me. It gives you an indication of how something so small can become a real barrier when living with PSP. It works best when translating full sentences rather than single words, but even so it is far ahead of anything I have used before. In my personal view it is about 90%+ accurate at least (an improvement for me of too high percent to even try to value).
I have been looking for this solution for a few weeks and I stumbled on it through a LinkedIn post. Surprisingly it is cheap. I am not a salesperson for Flow and I am not trying to sell it. If you want access, I can give you a link and I get a free month for each subscription, so I will not say no if someone asks. But I am not posting this to advertise anything. For anyone curious, in Israel it costs about 30 shekels, or about 10 dollars, per month, which is very reasonable for use on both my Mac and my iPhone.
Fundamentally this app allows me to do something that was becoming impossible. I can speak freely in a very tiny voice and it captures what I want to say on the first attempt. It does not include the slurring, hesitation or broken speech that normally appears when I use regular dictation.
One of the best features of this app is that it does not show it on the screen in real time. It does not show every word or every mistake as I speak. Instead, I hold the Fn button on my Mac, say everything I want to say, and when I let go, the app processes the full message. What I see is the final clean text. I do not have to watch the live version that shows every stutter or pause. For someone with PSP, that difference is enormous. It lets me focus on speaking, not correcting.
Why am I writing about this? Because we live in a technological age where sadly there is still no cure for PSP. PSP progresses as fast as it can say the word PSP. But there are things that help. This is one of them. I am very grateful for it and I want to share it (although I’m sure people have other options available to them). It does not work naturally in some apps like Microsoft Word. I use the Notes app and copy and paste but it works naturally in WhatsApp which is really important to me. I have hardly had to change a single word of this whispered copy and I am amazed.
I cannot pretend to be positive every moment. PSP is horrible and I will admit that I screamed yesterday and complained about the wheelchair and how difficult it is to push myself around the house. Others heard me and I was disappointed in myself.
But as well as trying to be positive, I am finding things that help me through this journey. Things like a YouTube video that shows how to change clothes while sitting down. Or how to push against walls to gain speed in the wheelchair. Or how to dictate text when I cannot type. I am sure there are other tools I have not discovered and I would welcome suggestions.
So here I am at 00:48. It has taken me 10 minutes to dictate this. I am annoyed beyond belief that my mobile phone is in another room. But I am happy that I have been able to dictate this article in 10 minutes and then put it through another AI tool to translate and proofread. I could use this app for Hebrew as well because it works in multi-language, but my Hebrew is so bad (relatively) that I’m just going to go straight to AI for translation.
We live in a technological age where there is an app for exactly what I need. I can whisper in the middle of the night without waking anyone and my computer still understands me. It does not show all the umms and aahs and half-formed words that I actually said. It only shows the finished thought.
It is not perfect. My situation is far from perfect and will not improve. Like many of you, I have concerns about this wave of AI technology. But for here and now, this tool called Flow is enough to make me happy. It has saved me an hour of time, a lot of pain and a lot of frustration compared with typing or using regular dictation. And that matters.
