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Cover image for Time Saving Tip #1 - Use Voice Dictation
Jake Lundberg
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Time Saving Tip #1 - Use Voice Dictation

A quick way to help you save time during your day, is to avoid typing altogether and use your voice instead. Speech to text software has gotten surprisingly good, and according to a Stanford study, is 3x faster than typing (in English). Not only that, but it's also less error prone, so you can avoid many of those embarrassing misspellings, typos, and fat finger slips.

I personally use it for all kinds of stuff, like comments in my code, writing documentation, PR descriptions, commit messages, slack messages, emails, AI prompts, blog posts, pretty much anything that's more than a sentence or two (even then I might still use it #lazydev).

MacOS has this built-in, and you can set up a keyboard shortcut to turn voice dictation on, so it's ridiculously easy to use (I personally have it set to turn on when I press control twice). To turn voice dictation on on your Mac, you can follow these instructions.

According to their docs, it looks like windows has this built-in as well, though I have not tested it myself, so cannot speak to its effectiveness and ease of use.

Hope this tip helps! Until next time, Happy Hacking!

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Top comments (14)

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bbkr profile image
Paweł bbkr Pabian • • Edited

I'm a Perl developer and last time I tried using voice dictation for writing code I accidentally summoned three minor demons...

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stefanmoore profile image
Stefan Moore •

Thank you for summoning me.

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wraith profile image
Jake Lundberg •

Now where are my 3 wishes! oh..wait...

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stefanmoore profile image
Stefan Moore •

That's my cousin Pooty Tang. I'll tell him to holla at ya!

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wraith profile image
Jake Lundberg •

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Jake Lundberg •

Hahaha well at least they were only minor! Those major demons and really mess some stuff up!!!

But back to dictation...I also haven't had a lot of luck with using voice for coding. The few things I've tried have been pretty spotty, so I stopped trying it. With that said, using something like GitHub Copilot (or similar), you can dictate the comment prompt and then let the AI write the code for you...after that it's just cleaning it up and testing it, so it still saves some time.

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folken718 profile image
OldMan Montoya •

I would be afraid that some curses appeared in my reviews or comments LOL

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Not totally the same, but I sometimes have voice conversations with ChatGPT via the app these days when I'm curious about a subject. It's a bit awkward, but less than this sort of thing used to be and it's kind of scary how this will improve.

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wraith profile image
Jake Lundberg •

Thank goodness I'm not alone! I do this too, while I'm driving and need to talk through a though or an idea...super helpful!

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Monty Harper •

Hello I was only dimly aware of this feature I hadn't tried it out before but of course if I'm going to leave a comment I need to leave it using dictation. Seems to be working pretty well, but I think it would take a lot of practice for me to get used to this!😊 hey, that worked. Pretty cool. Thanks!

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Jake Lundberg •

Thanks @montyharper ! Yeah, it can take some getting used to, especially if you aren't used to using something like Siri to send text messages, take notes, or whatever else she can do. But I've been using it for a while now and it was well worth the effort of getting used to a new habit!

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Alan Barr •

I am a huge fan of dictation using text-to-speech software such as Microsoft's Read Aloud feature. Also, ChatGPT is a wonderful transcriber with natural speech. My ability to put words and sentences in a natural order has really improved since I started using it.

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Makita Tunsill •

Thanks for the reminder. I'm not sure why I didn't implement this sooner.

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Jake Lundberg •

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