VoiceInk is great!
Due to a recent very cute addition to our family, I find myself operating the world one-handed more frequently. Part of the things I do while having a baby slung over the shoulder is occasionally wanting to type into text boxes. Matt Birchler mentioned what a game changer transcription is but I only looked into it recently.
VoiceInk is a transcription app for Mac. It is open source. There's a free version that prepends a sentence prompting you to upgrade. Upgrading is a one-off payment. No subscription! You can use the Pro version of the app by building it from source yourself. Being a cheapskate, this is what I did for the first couple of days. The building was super easy, but because the app worked so well, I was happy to pay and upgrade.
Setup
I've got the app set up to use Parakeet v3, a local transcription model, which has been very fast and accurate. It also works in German, which is great! On top of the local transcription, you can send the transcribed text off to different models to add in punctuation and correct mistakes. I've set it up to use the Claude Code CLI, which I already use. So no need for another service there.
Right option works well for me, slinging a baby over the left shoulder while having the right hand free and I don't use the key enough to trigger accidental transcription starts.
Workflow: Ramble more!
A side effect of enabling transcription is that I do much more rambling into a microphone–even when I have two hands free! For some processing it just helps to articulate the thoughts verbally.
For example, for design feedback, I found it helpful to have the agent generate multiple iterations. As I look through the design iterations I speak my thoughts and have them transcribed. Then I let the agent synthesize those thoughts into actionable feedback.
It also worked well for me to transcribe raw feature or product ideas into Claude Code and refine them with the ce-brainstorm skill.
Summary
In a twist, this whole blog post was written-transcribed using VoiceInk!
If you haven't looked into transcription apps yet, do check it out. It doesn't need to be VoiceInk, but transcription can just be another method to interact with your computer.1
Footnotes
- Dan Shipper from Every took this even a step further by interactively writing with ChatGPT voice. This stream is mesmerizing to watch–but there are some hard questions we need to ask ourselves about what it does to us when we use the human-to-human medium of dialogue in human-to-machine interactions. ↩