It's often better to segregate creative and inhibitive systems even if you need the inhibitive systems to produce a finished work. There's a (probably apocryphal) conversation between George RR Martin and Stephen King that goes something like:

GRRM: How do you write so many books?... Don't you ever spend hours staring at the page, agonizing over which of two words to use, and asking 'am I actually any good at this?'

SK: Of course! But not when I'm writing.

Alternatively: some people are just better at / more comfortable thinking in auditory mode than visual mode & vice versa.

In principle I don't see why they should have different amounts of thought. That'd be bounded by how much time it takes to produce the message, I think. Typing permits backtracking via editing, but speaking permits 'semantic backtracking' which isn't equivalent but definitely can do similar things. Language is powerful.

And importantly, to backtrack in visual media I tend to need to re-saccade through the text with physical eye motions, whereas with audio my brain just has an internal buffer I know at the speed of thought.

Typed messages might have higher _density_ of thought per token, though how valuable is that really, in LLM contexts? There are diminishing returns on how perfect you can get a prompt.

Also, audio permits a higher bandwidth mode: one can scan and speak at the same time.

That's fair. I sometimes find myself pausing or just talking in circles as I'm deciding what I want. I think when I'm speaking, I feel freer to use less precise/formal descriptions, but the model can still correctly interpret the technical meaning

In either case, different strokes for different folks, and what ultimately matters is whether you get good results. I think the upside is high, so I broadly suggest people try it out

I prefer writing myself, but I could see the appeal of producing a first draft of a prompt by dumping a verbal stream of consciousness into ChatGPT. That might actually be kind of fun to try while going on a walk or something.

I don’t feel restricted by my typing speed, speaking is just so much easier and convenient. The vast majority of my ChatGPT usage is on my phone and that makes s2t a no brainer.

I'm not the person you're replying to, but I use Whispering connected to the whisper-large-v3-turbo model on Groq.

It's incredibly cheap and works reliably for me.

I have got it to paste my voice transcriptions into Chrome (Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT) as well as Cursor.

https://github.com/EpicenterHQ/epicenter

I use Handy with Claude code. Nice to just have a key combo to transcribe into whatever has focus.

https://github.com/cjpais/Handy

I use Spokenly with local Parakeet 0.6B v3 model + Cerebras gpt-oss-120b for post-processing (cleaning up transcription errors and fixing technical mondegreens, e.g., `no JS` → `Node.js`). Almost imperceptible transcription and processing delay. Trigger transcription with right ⌥ key.

your OS might have a built in dictation thing. Google for that and try it before online services.

I use VoiceInk (needed some patches to get it to compile but Claude figured it out) and the Parakeet V3 model. It’s really good!

There are a few apps nowadays for voice transcription. I've used Wispr Flow and Superwhisper, and both seem good. You can map some hotkey (e.g., ctrl + windows) to start recording, then when you press it again to stop, it'll get pasted into whatever text box you have open

Superwhisper offers some AI post-processing of the text (e.g., making nice bullets or grammar), but this doesn't seem necessary and just makes things a bit slower

made this tool to press double control to start and another ctrl to stop which copies to the cliboard

https://github.com/elv1n/para-speak/

I use https://github.com/braden-w/whispering with an OpenAI api key.

I use a keyboard shortcut to start and stop recording and it will put the transcription into the clipboard so I can paste into any app.

It's a huge productivity boost - OP is correct about not overthinking trying to be that coherent - the models are very good at knowing what you mean (Opus 4.5 with Claude Code in my case)

I'm using Wispr flow, but I've also tried Superwhisper. Both are fine. I have a convenient hotkey to start/end recording with one hand. Having it just need one hand is nice. I'm using this with the Claude Code vscode extension in Cursor. If you go down this route, the Claude Code instance should be moved into a separate window outside your main editor or else it'll flicker a lot

For me, on Mac, VoiceInk has been top notch. Got tired of superwhispr

Spokenly on macOS with Soniox model.

> surprised ai companies are not making this workflow possible instead of leaving it upto users to figure out how to get voice text into prompt.

Claude on macOS and iOS have native voice to text transcription. Haven't tried it but since you can access Claude Code from the apps now, I wonder if you use the Claude app's transcription for input into Claude Code.

All the mobile apps make this very easy.