Brian Galvan

Background

I'm what you'd call a power user. I'm on a computer all day, every day, building, engineering, researching, writing, and marketing. I have been for most of my career, and the tools I use have to keep up with how I think or they get replaced.

My career started in software development and radio electronics engineering, so writing code and reasoning about systems from the silicon up has never been foreign to me. I was an early adopter of cloud-based platforms back when SaaS still needed explaining, built products in that space myself, and ran the DevOps teams that kept them running at scale.

The work that shaped me most came later, as a forward-deployed engineer. Stripped to its essence, the job was analyzing human behavior. Finding the shortcuts. Finding the inefficiencies. Finding the moments where a person was doing something a system could do for them. Bridging software platforms. Automating repetitive work. Replacing entire categories of human tasks with something that just runs.

Doing that long enough teaches you something most engineers never see directly. The entire economy, and the way we work inside it, is one long negotiation with our own efficiency. Technology is the interface in that negotiation. It either compounds your output or quietly taxes it. There is no neutral. And the micro-behaviors every human has, the small things we do thousands of times a day without thinking, are where most of that tax gets paid.

What I Chase

Personal efficiency is the thing I chase, relentlessly. It's the only reason I'm able to run multiple projects in parallel without dropping any of them. The trick has never been working harder. It's eliminating the micro-behaviors that drain hours out of every week.

Typing is one of them. Our minds and our thoughts move faster than our fingers. Anyone who writes in sentences for a living, whether you're a developer, researcher, marketer, writer, attorney, or founder, knows the feeling of a fully formed idea evaporating somewhere between your brain and the keyboard. Getting your thoughts into a document, a chat prompt, or a code editor without losing the thread isn't a nice-to-have for power users. It's the difference between shipping and stalling.

That single inefficiency, multiplied across a career, is what pushed me to build the tool this page is about.

SimplyTalk

As AI models matured, and as someone who lives deep in the development, research, and product-building side of that space, I started building private tools for myself to save time. Voice dictation became the one I used every single day. That personal tool evolved into SimplyTalk.app.

SimplyTalk is built for power users whose work and the cloud don't mix. An attorney dictating privileged information shouldn't be shipping that audio to someone else's servers. A medical professional documenting patient data legally can't. A researcher with sensitive material, a founder working on something unannounced, a journalist with protected sources, same story. Privacy isn't a feature for these people. It's a requirement.

Under the Hood

SimplyTalk is engineered around a simple idea. Your voice and your words should never have to leave your machine for the software to work. Everything that matters runs locally.

The core stack uses on-device speech-to-text models that run entirely on your hardware, with no audio uploads, no API round-trips to a third party, and no shadow logging in someone else's data center. Local inference means your dictation works on a plane, in a SCIF-adjacent environment, inside a hospital network, or in a law office that signed an NDA with teeth. It also means latency stays low because there's no network hop sitting between your thought and the cursor.

On top of the recognition layer, SimplyTalk handles the parts that most dictation tools ignore. Smart formatting that understands punctuation, paragraph breaks, and the difference between a sentence and a code block. Custom vocabulary for the jargon your industry actually uses. System-wide integration so it works in your editor, your browser, your chat client, your prompt boxes, and your terminal, not just one walled-off app. Hotkey-driven control so the tool stays out of the way until you summon it.

It's built to disappear into your workflow. That's the entire point. Software you stop noticing is software that's actually working.

The Subscription Problem

Subscription fatigue has gotten out of hand and most people know it.

Netflix, AI chats, Adobe, your password manager, your note app, your photo editor, your PDF reader. Every piece of software you touch now wants to put you on a monthly plan that ends up costing more in a year than the old one-time purchase did in a decade. The pricing creeps up. Features get pulled behind higher tiers. The thing you paid for last quarter is suddenly a "legacy plan" with a polite email asking you to upgrade.

Then there's the part nobody on those pricing pages talks about. You have no privacy inside any of it. They use your profile and your behavior to feed their own marketing engines, then resell what they learn about you to every other company willing to pay. You pay them once to use the product, and they get paid two or three more times on the back end selling who you are. You're the customer and the product at the same time, and you funded both sides of that transaction.

I'm done with it. SimplyTalk is a one-time purchase. It runs on your machine. It doesn't phone home. It doesn't have a profile of you, because there's nothing to profile. If that's the kind of software you've been waiting for someone to build again, this one's for you.