For months I’ve been dictating to my computer with a fashionable American app. It works well. But one day I read the fine print: my voice —my emails to clients, my notes, my things— travels to their servers. And on top of that I pay around 15 dollars a month, every month, forever. Almost 180 dollars a year to talk to my own computer.

That, on this blog, has a name: a toll without sovereignty.

So I built my own. In one afternoon. And with that sentence, dictated by my own app, this article begins.

The spark

It was lit by a video from Benjamín Cordero. In it he pitted the two most powerful AIs of the moment against three tasks, and the third one got me thinking: they took an open-source dictation app —free, legal, licensed to modify and even sell— and asked the AI to turn it into a product of their own, with its own brand, its own website, everything.

The young people in his community compete in pairs to do exactly that, with prizes and free computers. And I thought: if they can, so can I. With my harnesses.

An afternoon of work (the real kind: deciding)

I didn’t write a single line of code. I wrote decisions:

• That it be called Háblame (“talk to me”) — because that’s what you ask of it: talk to me, and I’ll write.
• That it belong to this house: by recableado.blog.
• That my voice never leave the computer. Recognition happens inside the Mac (or the PC — it works on both, and on Linux). No cloud. No “training” anyone’s AI.
• That the price be honest: one payment, yours forever. No monthly tolls.
• And that I control everything: who downloads it, who activates it, who I gift it to.

The AI (Claude, its big version) did the rest, following the sandwich method I learned from Cordero: the powerful AI plans, executes under supervision, and reviews at the end against a checklist. By that afternoon I was already dictating this sentence with my own app.

And I’ll say it with the honesty the house demands: Háblame is built on Handy, an open project with an MIT license that allows exactly this —taking it, changing it, making it yours—. Its original authorship stays intact in the code, as it should. I didn’t reinvent the wheel. I rewired it my way.

What Háblame does

You hold down a key, you speak, you let go — and the text appears written wherever your cursor is. In any program: email, Word, WhatsApp Web. In Spanish, in English, in more than twenty languages, with the punctuation in its place. And if you want, a “polish mode” removes the filler words and leaves the sentence clean — using the Mac’s own local AI, also without the cloud.

The only thing that travels over the internet is the license key when you activate it. Nothing else. Not your voice, not your text, not a word of what you dictate. I say it this plainly because transparency is the house: the website spells out, with no fine print, what it guarantees and the only thing it ever checks.

What this means (and it isn’t the app)

The moral isn’t that one more dictation app exists. It’s that digital sovereignty can now be wired up in an afternoon. A 72-year-old man, not a programmer, with judgment and a well-fitted harness, turned a dependency of almost 180 dollars a year into a tool of his own, one-time price, that respects his voice.

That’s Recableado: don’t depend. Design.

Want to try it?

I’ve prepared gift keys for the first readers who want to try it and tell me how it goes. Write to me from the website and I’ll send you yours with the instructions — installing is downloading and double-clicking, on Mac and Windows.

→ hablame.blog