Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jinay 393 days ago
I used to think that typing speed was not really that important, especially when now we have so many LLMs doing the typing for us. But honestly, now I think it's even more important because the specificity and detail in your prompts are paramount to getting a good response, and something like a dictation tool (which is what I'm using right now) is really good for generating very specific prompts.

In fact, I wrote all this out using a dictation tool in ~20 seconds (258 WPM).

2 comments

Agreed. I installed Whisper on my Linux computer with a program called SpeechNote. The dictation is all done offline, and it is astonishingly good.

I also have a whisper dictation app on my Android phone (the app's ID string is 'org.woheller69.whisper', there's a few Whisper apps with the same name "Whisper", but this one is my favorite).

FWIW this was typed by hand on my phone, but these apps are both amazing.

Curious, what dictation tool are you using?
https://github.com/JinayJain/dictator

Built one for myself. It's context-aware and promptable.

Tested well on Linux, not so much on other platforms but in theory should support them.

It's a bit meta but I wrote it mostly using Claude Code. Once I had an MVP, I was able to prompt much faster by just speaking out what I wanted it to change.

Same, 258wpm is something.
FYI I wrote a comment in the same thread where I described the tools I use (TLDR: Whisper).