Dictate client reports, proposals, meeting summaries, and strategy documents in minutes instead of hours. Steno turns your voice into text inside any app on your Mac, so you can bill for thinking, not for typing.
Consulting is a deliverables business. Clients pay for insights and recommendations, but what they receive are documents: strategy reports, assessment findings, implementation plans, executive summaries, and slide decks. The intellectual work of analyzing problems and developing solutions is often the smaller portion of a consultant's time. The larger portion is spent writing those insights into polished deliverables.
For independent consultants and small firms, this creates a painful dynamic. The more clients you serve, the more documents you need to produce. But every hour spent writing a report is an hour not spent on billable analysis, client meetings, or business development. The writing bottleneck effectively caps how much value a consultant can deliver and how much revenue they can generate.
The situation is made worse by the nature of consulting communication. Consultants spend their days in meetings, calls, and workshops where they articulate complex ideas verbally with ease. Then they return to their desks and spend hours typing those same ideas into documents. The transition from fluid verbal expression to slow typed composition is where enormous amounts of time and energy are wasted.
Immediately after a client meeting, hold the Steno hotkey and speak the key decisions, action items, open questions, and next steps. Release and the summary appears in your email or project management tool. Send it within five minutes of the meeting ending while everyone's memory is fresh. Clients notice and appreciate the responsiveness.
When writing a client report, dictate each section as you would present the findings to the client. The natural structure of verbal explanation often produces clearer, more logical prose than the tortured constructions that emerge from slow typing. You can draft a 10-page report narrative in under an hour of focused dictation. The instant transcription means no waiting between sections.
Proposals need to tell a compelling story about the client's challenge and your approach to solving it. Dictating this narrative lets your persuasive verbal skills translate directly to the page. Many consultants find that dictated proposals are more engaging and client-focused than typed ones because speaking naturally puts you in presentation mode.
Consulting slide decks require concise text on slides and detailed speaker notes. Dictate the talking points for each slide, then distill the key phrases for the slide itself. Steno works in PowerPoint, Google Slides, Keynote, and any presentation tool on your Mac. No switching apps or copying text between windows.
Consider the written deliverables for a typical one-week consulting engagement. Here is what the documentation process looks like with typing versus voice dictation.
| Task | Typing | Voice with Steno |
|---|---|---|
| Daily meeting summaries (5 days) | 75 minutes | 15 minutes |
| Client update emails | 45 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Final report narrative (15 pages) | 6 hours | 1.5 hours |
| Executive summary | 45 minutes | 12 minutes |
| Total per engagement | ~9 hours | ~2.5 hours |
Six and a half hours saved on a single engagement. For a consultant managing three to four concurrent projects, that translates to 20 or more hours per month, enough time for an entire additional engagement. Use the time savings calculator to estimate the impact on your specific workload.
Consultants work across multiple platforms, client environments, and tools. Steno works in all of them because it inserts text at the system level using the macOS Accessibility API. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Notion, Confluence, Slack, email, CRM systems, project management tools: Steno works in every text field on your Mac without plugins or configuration.
The 30-second setup means you can install it between meetings and start using it immediately. There is no training period, no voice profile to configure, and no IT department required. Hold the hotkey, speak, release. It is that simple.
Steno is designed for dictating your own speech, not for recording and transcribing meetings with multiple speakers. However, many consultants use Steno immediately after meetings to dictate a summary of key decisions, action items, and insights while the discussion is fresh. This produces comprehensive meeting notes in under two minutes.
Yes. Steno inserts text wherever your cursor is on your Mac using the macOS Accessibility API. It works with Google Docs, Google Slides, Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Notion, Confluence, Slack, email clients, and any other application where you can type text. No plugins or integrations are needed.
Steno sends audio to a transcription API over encrypted connections. No recordings or transcripts are stored on any server after processing is complete. Audio is discarded immediately after transcription. Steno does not retain any client data, project details, or confidential information on its servers.
Consultants who bill by the hour understand the value of time precisely. Speaking at 150 words per minute versus typing at 40 means written deliverables take roughly one quarter the time to produce. A consultant who spends 15 hours per week on written output can reduce that to 4 to 5 hours, reclaiming 10 or more hours for billable client work or personal time.
Join thousands of professionals who have reclaimed hours from documentation. Steno is free to download for Mac.
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