Named after the fastest typist who ever lived
In 1923, Albert Tangora sat down at a manual typewriter in front of a crowd and typed 147 words per minute — sustained, for a full hour. For the next century, that record stood as the ceiling on how fast a human could turn thought into text.
Here's the thing, though: you already beat him, every day. You just do it out loud. Most people type 40–60 words a minute — and speak at 150 or more. The fastest input device you own is the one you were born with.
So I wanted to talk to my computer. Simple wish — with one catch. Every tool I looked at came with the same fine print: your voice gets processed on our servers. And your voice is a biometric. Workdays are full of things that shouldn't leave the room — names, plans, half-formed ideas rambled at a text field. Streaming the most personal signal you produce to someone else's cloud, forever, in exchange for convenience is a bad trade. I wanted the convenience without the trade: dictation that works on a plane, in a locked-down site, on day one of an NDA. Everything on the machine. No uploads. Ever.
For years that was technically naive. Then it quietly stopped being naive: open-weight speech models — like IBM Granite Speech, Apache 2.0 — got good enough to transcribe faster than real time on an ordinary laptop. The entire cloud apparatus became optional.
And the name? In the 1980s, IBM Research built one of the first real speech-recognition systems and called it Tangora — after Albert. The name was a promise: someday you'll beat him by talking. The machines of that era weren't ready. The promise was just forty years early.
This app is that promise, kept. On your machine, and no one else's.