Faster Typing with Dictation

I am not a good typist. I type slowly and often make mistake. I had some attempts to speed up my typing speed. I used gtypist to practice in the past. It is very good software. However, I the speed still didn't improve so much and I just accept that fact.

Outside computer interaction, nowadays we also use phone all day. Although touch screen is good for multimedia, browsing, swiping, it is really bad for typing. There is autocomplete. There are also different keyboard that can help to speed up like the one that we just need to trace the letter of words we want to type. But they are not improving the baseline speed.

So how I can improve my typing speed? Writing is thinking tools. If you can't write fast enough you might lost important ideas.

Now enter dictation. Dictation is not a new thing. But in this AI era, it becomes much better. Because apart of trying to encode my speech to text, the modern dictation will auto correct, detecting filler words and fix grammar too. The best of all, we can speak faster than any fast typist.

The speaking interaction is also interesting when I pair it with chatbot or coding agent. So nowadays, I can just code by talking.

With all the interesting potential, to be honest, I still find it awkward to speak on the dictation. I have been typing for decades, and it will need times to adapt to different workflow. When typing, backspace is cheap when we need to rephrase something. Modern dictation actually smart too in detecting when we are making correction. But I just still don't feel the process to be natural yet.

I have been using Wispr Flow in the last couple of months. I yet to try another provider because Wispr satisfy my dictation needs. It is multi platform in mobile and desktop. I still use free subscription although I am considering to go to paid plan. There are some small issues here and there, such as the dictation is not updating the output but I can tolerate it. The support is also very responsive when once I report one issue. I also wish there is easy keybinding to use. The default is fn key. We can use CTRL or Option or Cmd key. But it might interfere with other shortcut.