How I wrote this post with voice dictation and AI

I want to share how I’ve written this article and some recent ones, because I’m actually quite enjoying it. I’ve been using dictation and AI.

Just to be clear, this is still created by me. Technically, AI has typed the words and corrected some grammar and punctuation along the way. But these are my thoughts, in my style. I dictated them on the way to my workspace.

It’s about a twenty-minute drive. Each morning now, on the way there, I have some quiet time to think and dictate a LinkedIn post and an insight article for the HiTide website.

The ideas are enjoyable. The admin isn’t.

I’m quite keen to keep putting this content out there. I’ve started having more people find me through things like ChatGPT and Claude picking up on my site. I think putting some posts out there and doing a bit of low-level SEO is worth trying.

It might be a massive waste of time. We’ll find out. But for now, I’m keen to keep producing it.

My issue, as a busy solo professional, was finding the time to sit down and write several high-quality insight articles. Even one a week is a big ask. It’s a time commitment, and I hate sitting down to try to get my thoughts onto the page in a coherent way.

Then you’ve got to sort out all the subheadings, format everything and get it into the publishing platform on the website. Awful.

But I’ve realised that’s the admin of it. Coming up with the ideas, getting them into a coherent form and talking about this stuff, I enjoy. I have zero interest in sitting down to type it all out.

There’s also the risk that it won’t be a good use of my time. Putting an hour a week into sitting down and writing this? Absolutely not. No bloody way. That’s time I could spend elsewhere.

Doing it on the way to work feels different. I’ve got that twenty-minute drive anyway. It’s not a bad use of the time for a bit of a gamble. Not that every journey has to be productive. There’s nothing wrong with listening to music.

My own 80s executive setup

I don’t know what stage of this new way of working we’re at. I imagine it’s just the beginning. But you don’t have to be sat chained to a desk all the time to be insanely productive.

Some things that used to be expensive are now hilariously cheap.

This feels like being an 80s executive who dictates their thoughts and has an assistant interpret them and write them up. Having someone do all of that for me would have been a significant expense. Now it feels like almost nothing.

The best bit is that my website is hooked up to Codex, which I use for software development. I’ve briefed it on what I’m trying to do, where we’re publishing and what to do and what not to do.

It knows to use UK spelling. If I say “organisation”, that’s with an S, not a Z. It knows not to overuse commas, because that drives me insane. It knows to take out the ums and ers and add sensible paragraphs and subheadings where they fit.

It also knows how to format the article on the website, generate a cover image and set up the meta title, description and other SEO bits. All that publishing admin is part of the same job.

There’s still a copy-and-paste step

At the moment, when I get to work, I have to copy and paste the transcript over. Then it can turn it into the article or LinkedIn post I want.

I’m sure I can get rid of that step. I haven’t done it yet, but I’d like the transcript to be picked up and handled automatically.

Even with that step, my trip to work has become ridiculously productive. I think that’s quite a fascinating progression. This is original content, from my own thoughts, and it’s been fun to create. It takes barely any extra time.

What else could we do with voice dictation?

I’m now thinking about where we could push this. What else could I do with voice dictation? What else could I do in the car?

It doesn’t have to be the car either. How could a walk in the woods turn into a useful piece of work?

I’ve written before about how AI is changing my role as a software engineer. The old idea of my job was sitting at a desk coding. The more the merrier. Type faster than you did last week and you’re more productive. It was almost a selling point.

Now, for me, being the person who can type the code fastest has stopped being the point. And with this article, I haven’t needed to sit down and type it at all.