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It's so bizarre to me that people want to do this. Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? Aren't you self-conscious

It's so bizarre to me that people want to do this. Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? Aren't you self-conscious talking out loud? How are our experiences so different?

arcanemachiner 2mo ago
My stream of barely-intelligible rambling comes out much faster than I can type, and it's not even close. It's a skill like any other. You start out stuttering and second-guessing yourself, but after a while, you get better at it. And the LLM smooths out the odd mistakes better than you might think.
estearum 2mo ago
These are all interrelated points and the sibling comment is correct: it's a skill. The key thing with these voice systems is that you do not need to edit anything. You can literally just stream of consciousness into them, no editing, include the backtracking, the live-revisions, etc., and it will actually all produce vastly better context for the LLM than the written thing you took even 30 seconds to edit for clarity or brevity. I had a very similar disposition towards this idea just 6 months ago. I highly recommend trying it out. The key thing is that you do not need to edit. Just keep talking. Try it for a few weeks!
- charcircuit 2mo ago
  You don't need to edit anything when you are typing either. You don't even need to worry about spelling or typos.
  - estearum 2mo ago
    Seems much harder to learn how to write how you never write, versus just learning to speak to a computer the same way you speak to anything else.
    - esseph 2mo ago
      A lot of people on the autism spectrum can have issues with speaking or speaking speed, but have no such barrier necessarily to typing speed. I'd imagine there's a statistically large number of people that meet that criteria on this website.
      - estearum 2mo ago
        I mean we don't need to do any epidemiological studies here or anything. If someone hasn't tried it, they should. It's probably quite different from how they're expecting, might be great, and costs basically nothing. Try it for a few days and if it doesn't work in your workflow, obviously don't do it. But I have encountered many many people who raised these exact same arguments against trying it, then tried it, and were hooked within days. Exactly 0% of people I've ever convinced to try it decided it just wasn't for them and went back to typing full-time.
        esseph 2mo ago
        The thought of talking drives me insane but you do you, boo-boo :)
        estearum 2mo ago
        Yes virtually every person I've ever talked to about this had the same initial reaction
    - charcircuit 2mo ago
      What do you mean how you never write? You can just write what for want to say instead of saying it out loud. It is not a special skill, it's no different than how you write a message, just that you don't hit backspace to go back and correct things.
      - estearum 2mo ago
        Correct, it's no different from how you normally write, except for the ways in which it is. We agree.
jhogervorst 2mo ago
> Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? For me personally: no, I speak faster than I type; and speaking actually helps me get more ideas compared to typing. (Not sure if that’s due to having no typing speed barrier, or maybe because speaking activates different parts of the brain.) Once you get over the feeling of self-consciousness, it’s a great way. I even go on short walks sometimes and mumble to my phone to prepare some long prompt. Thinking works even better, when walking outside :-)
- 8note 2mo ago
  do you perchance have no inner monologue? its a physical difference in how people think that would affect typing vs talking
  - TeMPOraL 2mo ago
    I do have inner monologue, and in the past, vocalizing it properly and basically talking to myself was a great focus booster. I've been socially conditioned out of doing that though, but I sometimes still do that in form of typing to a text file. Whether via inner monologue or explicit talking to myself, vocalizing mentally or out loud is always faster than typing to me, even though I type rather fast. Still, that's only a "mid gear" for me. The ultimate state of greatest focus, attention and speed, is wordless flow. Inner monologue shuts off near completely there; I don't need to formulate words in my head to do things, I just feel and do. It's my favorite state to be in, and it's where what I consider my best work has been done, but sadly, I very rarely attain such state. So: Inner monologue < Talking to myself << Wordless flow (Funny thing, if you were to record me talking to myself, you'd see pretty much the same thing as in LLM thinking traces - including all the "but wait!" bits. My personal "brain dump" journal looks very much like GPT-4/Deepseek-R1 thinking traces - i.e. back before companies realized thinking traces are great for model distillation, and replaced them with summaries.)
  - jhogervorst 2mo ago
    Late reply — my Hacker News reading app doesn’t give alerts on replies. You’re right, I don’t have an inner monologue. Only when I think about words or text literally, like when formulating this reply, I ‘sense’ the words that I come up with. Though I don’t ‘hear’ them. I also have aphantasia. I can’t mentally ‘see’ things when I imagine them. I can ‘sense’ them, just like the words I formulate. It’s as if I know the thing I imagine is there, but it’s behind a blackout curtain. Interesting topics! How little we still know about our own brain. And how different our brains seem to work.

arcanemachiner 2mo ago

My stream of barely-intelligible rambling comes out much faster than I can type, and it's not even close. It's a skill like any other. You start out stuttering and second-guessing yourself, but after a while, you get better at it. And the LLM smooths out the odd mistakes better than you might think.

estearum 2mo ago

These are all interrelated points and the sibling comment is correct: it's a skill. The key thing with these voice systems is that you do not need to edit anything. You can literally just stream of consciousness into them, no editing, include the backtracking, the live-revisions, etc., and it will actually all produce vastly better context for the LLM than the written thing you took even 30 seconds to edit for clarity or brevity. I had a very similar disposition towards this idea just 6 months ago. I highly recommend trying it out. The key thing is that you do not need to edit. Just keep talking. Try it for a few weeks!

charcircuit 2mo ago
You don't need to edit anything when you are typing either. You don't even need to worry about spelling or typos.
- estearum 2mo ago
  Seems much harder to learn how to write how you never write, versus just learning to speak to a computer the same way you speak to anything else.
  - esseph 2mo ago
    A lot of people on the autism spectrum can have issues with speaking or speaking speed, but have no such barrier necessarily to typing speed. I'd imagine there's a statistically large number of people that meet that criteria on this website.
    - estearum 2mo ago
      I mean we don't need to do any epidemiological studies here or anything. If someone hasn't tried it, they should. It's probably quite different from how they're expecting, might be great, and costs basically nothing. Try it for a few days and if it doesn't work in your workflow, obviously don't do it. But I have encountered many many people who raised these exact same arguments against trying it, then tried it, and were hooked within days. Exactly 0% of people I've ever convinced to try it decided it just wasn't for them and went back to typing full-time.
      - esseph 2mo ago
        The thought of talking drives me insane but you do you, boo-boo :)
        estearum 2mo ago
        Yes virtually every person I've ever talked to about this had the same initial reaction
  - charcircuit 2mo ago
    What do you mean how you never write? You can just write what for want to say instead of saying it out loud. It is not a special skill, it's no different than how you write a message, just that you don't hit backspace to go back and correct things.
    - estearum 2mo ago
      Correct, it's no different from how you normally write, except for the ways in which it is. We agree.

jhogervorst 2mo ago

> Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking? For me personally: no, I speak faster than I type; and speaking actually helps me get more ideas compared to typing. (Not sure if that’s due to having no typing speed barrier, or maybe because speaking activates different parts of the brain.) Once you get over the feeling of self-consciousness, it’s a great way. I even go on short walks sometimes and mumble to my phone to prepare some long prompt. Thinking works even better, when walking outside :-)

8note 2mo ago
do you perchance have no inner monologue? its a physical difference in how people think that would affect typing vs talking
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago
  I do have inner monologue, and in the past, vocalizing it properly and basically talking to myself was a great focus booster. I've been socially conditioned out of doing that though, but I sometimes still do that in form of typing to a text file. Whether via inner monologue or explicit talking to myself, vocalizing mentally or out loud is always faster than typing to me, even though I type rather fast. Still, that's only a "mid gear" for me. The ultimate state of greatest focus, attention and speed, is wordless flow. Inner monologue shuts off near completely there; I don't need to formulate words in my head to do things, I just feel and do. It's my favorite state to be in, and it's where what I consider my best work has been done, but sadly, I very rarely attain such state. So: Inner monologue < Talking to myself << Wordless flow (Funny thing, if you were to record me talking to myself, you'd see pretty much the same thing as in LLM thinking traces - including all the "but wait!" bits. My personal "brain dump" journal looks very much like GPT-4/Deepseek-R1 thinking traces - i.e. back before companies realized thinking traces are great for model distillation, and replaced them with summaries.)
- jhogervorst 2mo ago
  Late reply — my Hacker News reading app doesn’t give alerts on replies. You’re right, I don’t have an inner monologue. Only when I think about words or text literally, like when formulating this reply, I ‘sense’ the words that I come up with. Though I don’t ‘hear’ them. I also have aphantasia. I can’t mentally ‘see’ things when I imagine them. I can ‘sense’ them, just like the words I formulate. It’s as if I know the thing I imagine is there, but it’s behind a blackout curtain. Interesting topics! How little we still know about our own brain. And how different our brains seem to work.