Amazed by voice-to-text convenience and fun
I did not plan this post and it is not highly technical. But I really want to share my experience. If anyone comes across this, a month ago I had an accident in a garden and my thumb got badly cut. Not fully, but I still had a big injury. A week ago I had surgery and now I cannot work with my right hand. I cannot type and I cannot use a mouse. I can barely move the fingers on my right hand and that led me to explore the topic of voice-to-text since my work is related to email writing, support tickets, and similar tasks.
Many people contact me asking for advice and asking for different opinions. The default Windows voice-to-text is not good. It is lagging and it is not putting in correct punctuation. It is not doing any grammar checks or corrections. Well it maybe does a little bit but not much.
After a little bit more research I came across Wispr Flow and I tried it. I’m so amazed that I will most likely keep it even when my hands start working again and I’m able to type. Here are several reasons why I like it and why I might keep it:
- It is really, really fast to get my thoughts into typed text.
- It is doing very interesting formatting and definitely is doing a great job with punctuation. Word detection is not superb but it is good, very good. My native language is not English and it is still able to pick up what I want to say. For my native language it is doing an even better job.
Besides the fact that I can get my thoughts into an email or into a support ticket faster, I actually start liking it. Before that my whole day was mostly in silence, with maybe some background music, just to have a pace on a day. Now I actually talk a lot and that feels real. That feels like me talking to a person.
It also means that I have to think about what I say because I have discovered that we have way more thoughts than we actually write. All my answers right now are way longer than before. Before I was hesitating to answer customers. I didn’t like it much so I tried to keep it really, really short, like “done, fixed, and so and so.” Even though we always have so much more to tell and it’s nice to explain a little bit to people, with this feature where I can actually just talk and say what I think, it feels amazing.
This post I’m writing completely by voice-to-text with Wispr Flow. I’m not editing any mistakes so if there are any, well, that’s it.
Guys, I really want to encourage you to try. It is fun, especially if you are working from home alone, you are able to talk, and you find yourself spending most of the day silent. Try it. It is fun.
I’m not coding with it. I think that would be a little bit strange but any other talk is done with this now. I’m talking to ChatGPT, talking to Cursor, talking to my emails, talking to my chats. It’s fun and interesting to see how long it will take for my colleagues to complain that I’m writing too-long messages.
