What HeyDonna is
HeyDonna is a transcript editor for legal transcribers. Give it a template, your formatting rules, the job sheet and the audio, and it produces a correctly formatted DOCX. AI handles the transcription, proofreading and formatting. Donna, the built-in copilot, helps you through the editing.
We beta tested it with Scribie’s legal transcribers. It already doubles their productivity.
Why we built it
Legal transcription is still slow, manual work. Automated transcripts have errors and speakers need fixing. Templates live in Word, and the audio player is a separate app, so people run several tools and switch between them all day. A deposition can run up to eight hours, a transcript can take days to finish, and the accuracy bar is strict.
HeyDonna puts all of that in one workspace. AI does most of the heavy lifting and produces a formatted draft. You go through it and fix the rest.
One honest note: LLMs are good at formatting but not yet great at proofreading. The formatted text still needs one careful pass. The most common problems we see are speaker attribution and mishears, so that’s where the review tools focus.
How we built it
The app is fairly complex. We rebuilt most of what Word does, in the browser, plus synced audio and legal formatting.
It was built by a team of AI agents: one CTO, one PM and six full-stack developers. Our rule was that the code doesn’t matter, the tests do. The goal was to push the models to their limits and see how good they really are at software development. The team talks to beta users on Slack, triages bugs and feature requests, designs, builds, tests, deploys and watches the logs.
My part was architecture and a lot of QA. I didn’t write a single line of code by hand, and I’ve probably seen about 5% of the codebase. Mostly I observed and steered.
The app works, and I like using it. So my verdict is that agents can do great engineering. The next question is whether they can grow the app and help me turn it into a business.
What’s next
More advanced editing features, much better proofreading, and online reinforcement learning, so the system improves from every correction.
Try it
New accounts start with 2,500 free credits. There’s no subscription: credits cost $0.01 each, and you can top up any time. We read every message, so tell us what works and what doesn’t at support@heydonna.law.