I showed the dictation app to a skeptic

By Georg Malahov

I'm sitting in the car outside the center where my older daughter has her dress rehearsal, waiting for her. While waiting I ran into a neighbor, we got talking — and I showed him my dictation app. The same one that grew out of the one-button shortcut and recently moved into my hub — this very site.

The neighbor was skeptical and didn't particularly want to look at anything — he agreed out of politeness. He doesn't use artificial intelligence; he says at work they have the official corporate Copilot from Microsoft — and that's it. And here's what happened: my already well-worn demo — dictating a grocery list for the store — genuinely pleased him. You speak Russian — you get German, fast. Edits to the dictated text. Your own presets — saved sets of rules for how the text should be formatted. He didn't ooh and aah, but I could see his interest growing from near zero: at some point he got genuinely interested, and the idea of creating his own presets appealed to him too.

For me that's a notable reaction. Usually people are indifferent to my products — and here was someone cold to AI altogether, who lingered and started trying things himself. Clearly dictation, translation, grocery lists — these are things close to people. Whether they're ready to pay for it is another question. He asked about the price himself, and the price seemed high to him: he'd buy it, but cheaper. I'm not changing anything for now — I wasn't selling to him or talking him into it, I just showed it and let him try. Maybe the right move here is different: give people a way to recommend the app to friends and earn free months for it.

Two takeaways I wrote down immediately. First: the moment he heard the word "app," the first place he went was the App Store. He would never install a web app himself, no matter what instructions I gave him, and that's a problem. I probably do need to stop begrudging the hundred euros for an Apple developer account, wrap the current app, make a listing and try to publish — if only to finally walk that path once. Showing people an app from the store is easier than a link.

The second takeaway is a bug. The neighbor logged in, started a recording — and instead of a microphone permission prompt got a cryptic error saying there's no access. To hell with showing that: it should have simply asked for the microphone again. At a moment like that a person doesn't read error messages — he decides the thing doesn't work.

On the whole the experience is more positive than not — the liveliest reaction to my products in a long time. A good sign, and I need to finish things up as fast as I can: the next skeptic will get a version where the microphone simply asks for permission instead of scaring people with an error.