I’ve spoken fast and a bit unclearly my entire life. It’s one of those small curses you’re probably just born with. Speech therapy didn’t help and practicing on my own never really stuck. The worst part is worrying people won’t understand me, especially when presenting something important. I often wear a headset when presenting that plays my voice back to me in real time so I can hear myself speak and try to slow down. It hasn’t stopped me from doing things. I have a great career and good friends. But I still end up repeating myself a lot.

I’ve never found a system that fits into a normal schedule with work, kids, and everything else. So yesterday I built a small tool to help me practice pacing my speech in short sessions whenever I have a few minutes. It gives you paced stories to read, with tongue twisters mixed in, plus a free practice mode where it calculates how fast you were speaking at the end.

It runs fully client-side, uses Google’s speech API, and is open source: https://github.com/interactivecats/steady Note: Just saw there is a bug on mobile where it double counts - trying to fix (on desktop, where I use it, it works fine)