Voice typing is an often-overlooked form of input into computers that allows you to enter a lot of information without actually having to use your hands. Computers have gotten incredibly good at voice to text conversion in the last few years. Voice typing is something that I have used extensively myself in the past. It's quite a bit faster than it used to be too and faster than what you can type manually, which means you can get drafts out in record time.
In training for the New York bar exam ten years ago I used voice typing to create my study materials because I was suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome at the time. It wasn't perfect back then and you really had to say things carefully and clearly for the computer to capture them. But still, you were able to capture 90 to 95% of the things you were saying just by voice typing which really made it possible for me to voice type a lot of information. It would then take some clean-up on my part so basically it was typing with my voice followed by manual editing.
These days there are many useful voice to text tools, such as Google's built-in voice transcription service that is available on applications such as Google Docs. It can be used on computers or on your iOS devices and, of course, on any Google mobile device. It leverages Google's powerful Cloud computational capabilities to transcribe your voice very quickly over the internet and then put it into the Google Doc that you are working on.
To get it to work on your mobile iOS device you want to enable and install Gboard, Which acts as a Google keyboard on your phone. This will work best with more recent versions of iOS, specifically iOS 16 and newer. On older versions of iOS the system will Cut off your ability to type after a few seconds which means constantly having to click on The Voice typing button. I assume this is because it wasn’t meant to type long pieces but more like notes and such. iOS has a decent built in voice to text method as well but I find Google’s to be even faster and more responsive. Apple’s own iOS voice typing method also cuts off after a few seconds.
Windows also has its own speech to text system. This system allows you to control all of Windows using your voice. There are also a few paid applications such as Dragon that you can use for voice typing. I think overall the best system available as of November 2022 is still Google though. Google makes it easy to type and then voice type and kind of do both of them at the same time. This allows you to use the best features of each input method simultaneously.
For professional writers, it's also possible to use transcription services that actually use a human to convert your spoken word from a sound file into text. So you'd basically record yourself on a recorder or recording application and then have that information transcribed into text. These systems can supposedly be very good, I have yet to use one though but many writers swear by them. They do charge by the word or by the length of the audio file and can get pricey so it's mostly a tool that is going to be cost-effective if you are making your living from writing.
Unfortunately the formatting required for comic scripts makes it challenging to voice type them. Google's system doesn't do a great job of letting you format dialogue for prose fiction either since it doesn't recognize the quotation mark command so I'm still trying to figure out the best approach for voice typing fiction.
Overall voice typing is a really interesting input method that every professional writer should try at least once because it can really change the game as far as the ergonomics of writing. Protecting your hands and your carpal tunnel nerves while allowing you to be as or more productive than if you are simply typing whatever you are trying to get into a file.
This article was 90% written by voice and then cleaned up by hand.
Comments