alt Hacker NewsHow do you use voice-to-text? You mean, in the browser? I am only familiar with Claude Code, which I have installed on remote server, and there obviously, voice-to-text does not work. I have to type, which is tiring.
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There are many tools for this, and I use the one that I tried first, so there are probably better-suited alternatives out there.
I run MacWhisper, and I paired it with BetterTouchTool so it triggers on any input when I double tap the fn/globe icon.
Obviously all of my transcriptions through it are entirely local. I usually use the Large V3 Turbo model, though in the beginning I used Parakeet v3, which was slightly faster but produced more mistakes (and kept a lot of filler words -- 'ahhm', 'hummm').
However, if I'm interacting with the Claude or ChatGPT/Codex apps, I often use their voice recognition instead, because it tends to be more accurate, especially with punctuation, albeit significantly slower. OpenAI's is noticeably better than Anthropic but I feel like that gap has closed a bit recently (might be all in my head, though).
Like I said I don't really care about mistakes in the transcription. If you try to read it, it feels like a fever dream, but the LLMs get it.
If I say "taken" it may have "take and" If I say "all the while calling the method" it might have "although a while. while. call in the met of". This is a rather extreme example but I've seen them happen. The repetition of words happens because I'm talking with "humns and ahs" and do repeat words or just the ends of words. It's very rare for the models, especially Opus, to have any issue with this transcription. When they do, they tend to signal to me they didn't get it, or I catch them in the act. But, like I said, it really is very very rare.
As an example, I've got quite a significant feature to work on, which would have probably taken me weeks to design and implement, and I've used this exact method today to ink out the plan:
- I have spent the last couple of days researching the feature in my off-time and just "thinking about it in the background" (think: I fall asleep thinking of it -- a habit I've always had)
- I spent ~25 minutes brainstorming out loud. The transcript ended with ~17.000 characters and ~3.000 words.
- I sent that transcript, in cursor, to Opus 4.6-High with instructions on how to iterate on it and how I want to work while planning
- I then spent about 1.5 hours with it iterating and building the actual plan (and supporting technical decision document, which points at the FULL transcript of the whole interaction). Many of my original ideas made it to the final plan, others got scrapped or simplified, and others still got added. It contains a mixture of my ideas, Opus' ideas and our push-back on "each other".
- Now I have a multi-step plan, with at least 8 distinct stages to implement this massive feature which I know for a fact would have taken me weeks to implement, and I expect to implement it in at most 3 days, but very likely it will be a day and a half.
Final context (with regards to your Claude Code question): My main development environment is Cursor, though for personal projects I also use Codex and Claude code. For the initial "researching of the feature in my off-time" I often have interactions with ChatGPT and Claude where they have no access to the codebase, and I have them go find out what the state of the art on specific topics is. All of these interactions also involve me using my voice to talk to them (though nowadays I don't typically use their voice mode, I just let them reply in text). Then I brood over that.
I’ve installed Hex on os x. You just hold down a hot key to talk and it writes into whatever text entry widget is focussed.