Getting back to writing, thanks to Wispr Flow
It’s been almost three years since the last time I wrote a blog post, mainly because it takes a lot of time and effort for me to write something.
A few months before I wrote my last post on building quadcopters, I had started something called a scrapbook where I would write short paragraphs about what I was working on every day or every few days. They were basically a bunch of mini blog posts. I did that on and off for almost two years, maybe a bit more, but then I stopped that as well. This was mainly because it was hard to write regularly, even when it was short.
When I’m trying to write down my thoughts—I end up editing a lot as I go. Ideally, I should just write what I feel like, make a rough draft, and then go back to it to iron out the kinks and edit everything. When I’m writing, though, it’s hard for me to go with the flow. So I think a lot, stop a lot, pause, hit backspace, and it takes up a lot of mental bandwidth in the process, which I rarely have these days.
I recently found a tool called Wispr Flow, which is basically a transcription tool where I can speak into a mic and it transcribes what I’m saying into text. Previously, I didn’t have much luck with dictation tools because the way I speak is not very polished and I don’t speak in an organized manner. I repeat myself a lot and use a lot of filler words, so my speech is as messy as my typing.
Wispr Flow differentiates itself by using AI to process what I’m saying. Instead of just jotting it down verbatim, it tries to filter out filler words and things that probably should not appear in writing, and it outputs a pretty polished text that I like. It’s been helpful so far.
I think I’m going to start writing more blog posts because now that I can just speak instead of having to type, I can get more of my thoughts out in a shorter period of time. It doesn’t take as much effort on my side to begin speaking, so I guess that allows me to be more candid.
More importantly, when I’m speaking, I don’t see the words appear on the screen in real time. Wispr Flow processes the entire recording as a whole and then writes it to the screen. Since I have no way to see what I’m saying, it makes it almost impossible for me to edit as I go.
In other news, I have been revamping my website. I always wanted a minimalist website and my previous WordPress website was pretty alright. But these days even that feels too bloated, so I am ditching WordPress and just making a static website using Hugo.
Expect more blog posts from now on, I guess.