I've always dreamed of having the ability to just talk to my computer (in the right circumstances) so I actually worked in the field for many years. The main reason I never use speech recognition today is because I have zero interest of sending recordings of my voice to the servers of some global corporations.

Running speech recognition and TTS locally is quite feasible, as projects like this one show.

I do a ton of coding (codex) with a tts/stt wrapper. During walks, cycling, in the car. Not every task is suited to this style of interaction, but many are. Long form codex replies are condensed, code blocks are suppressed all in the name of making it work for tts feedback. So it works best on well defined projects with guardrails, where you know the agent can perform well.

I use the Hex[1] app on MacOs for near instant transcription with Parakeet V3. This is how I speak to Code agents at least 80% of the time. The idea is - I tend to be lazy if I need to type lots of details, so speaking lets me get into details that I otherwise wouldn’t and this helps give more useful context to the agent. This often tends to be an unstructured brain dump so I sometimes ask the agent to repeat back what it understood, so I can make sure, and this also likely helps it stay on track.

[1] hex https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

I used to use Handy but as of a few months ago it had stuttering and other issues so I switched to Hex. Even for relatively long minute long dictation, transcription is near instant and accuracy is more than sufficient, especially when talking to AI since it that can “read between the lines “.

Using voice with code agents is a huge unlock and I’m surprised to see some people I recommend it to, still resist it.

As for TTS I found it fun to make a voice plugin for Claude Code that uses PocketTTS, so it can give brief updates whenever it finishes a turn:

https://pchalasani.github.io/claude-code-tools/plugins-detai...

I (well CC and I) wrote a tts/stt pipeline for the CLI of CC. It's a lot more, immersive I guess, when I open my dev environment and it gives me a verbal walk through of what's going on.

(this inspired some more demo-y stuff I have where claude can manipulate the mouse and audit things it's built visually in conjunction with that). I'm sure this has already been wrapped up into some MCP framework, but it was fun to build it super early on and it just sort of works for me.

I don't use this in my day job, but it does feel very futuristic when I pull up my home lab.

What I want is a 1940s style “taking dictation” where the words I say go through a step where the goal is to create the text Im imagining. So if I say “… very significant, actually just significant…” what Claude Code receives is “…significant…”.

I built this myself with whisper -> “secretary” prompt -> Claude Code, but having the first two steps be interactive is really what I would want.

I'm founder of ottex.ai, I use stt pretty much all the time when work with AI and quite often for communications to draft emails and chat messages.

I started ottex half a year ago after I tested gemini 2.5 flash native audio support. I was blown away by the quality of transcripts and decided to built an app to use it myself.

Currently the default model in the app is Gemini 3 flash, but you can connect to 9 providers and God knows how many models to play with.

I would suggest you to try this models for ai prompting:

- Gemini 3 / 3.5 flash - Soniox rtt v5 - Mistral transcribe v2 - assembly 3.5 pro

On some days, half of my promts to Copilot at work are spoken to a local whisper medium model running on an Intel ARC GPU.

One of my side projects is a tool that lets you control your entire system with STT. It's built on Whisper and supports hot swapping custom profiles, so you can add easy commands for any software.

I intend to use it to work on low stakes vibe coding projects while I'm doing other stuff. Todays LLMs are a lot better at interpreting rambling dictation with mid-message corrections.

There are a few paid programs out there that do the same, but they made my vibe slop sense tingle and are not aimed at development.

https://handy.computer is the goto. It can even add an LLM pass (optionally) so if you say "remind me to buy three, actually, four, eggs" it'll type "remind me to buy four eggs".

Industry leading Interactive Voice Response systems have become very good at filling in ambiguous information from context, and modulating pronunciation to Ape emotional information.

However, being able to interact with these natural language systems in uncontrolled settings is still a fools errand. For STT, there is also regional dialect, slang, and individual differences.

Witnessing blind users hit unrecognizable reading-speeds on old Gordon 8 TTS systems was surprising. I learned people adapt to imperfect systems pretty quickly. =3

For STT, wispr flow has a generous free tier. For TTS, I have Claude read out loud what it just finished as a stop hook, so I know which claude finished up.

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