Stop using the keyboard and start using Handy, a free speech-to-text app

If it’s old science fiction Regardless of the shows, we are all using our computers wrong. We still write with our fingers, like cavemen, instead of speaking out loud as the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch the keyboard? Of course not.

This is strange because our computers are all capable of converting speech to text by default. The problem? It doesn’t work very well. Or at least it didn’t happen. In recent years, AI models like Nvidia’s Parakeet and OpenAI’s Whisper, both open source, have made great strides in converting human voices into text. They both excel at correctly adding things like punctuation and capitalization, and you can run them directly on your computer. Using these models is the closest I’ve ever felt to recording a captain’s log, it just works.

The problem? Both are a bit complicated to set up. This is where Handy comes in. It’s a very simple and completely free application that can set up any of these templates on your computer and gives you a keyboard shortcut to use. It was created by CJ Pais after he broke his finger, leaving him unable to write. He wanted a completely free and radically simple way to use existing AI tools to convert speech to text.

To get started, simply download Handy — there are versions available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Launch the application and you will be asked which template you want to use.

Courtesy of Justin Bott